(Credit: Noumenon)
This is a new kind of flat-pack furniture. There are no Allen keys, no screws, no scratching your head over Ikea-style instructions. Instead, Noumenon designer Carl de Smet‘s Memories of the Future furniture just needs a little loving warmth.
It’s made from shape memory polyurethane (SMP), a material invented by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry that expands when heated. This allows de Smet to manufacture the chair and squash it down to 5 percent of its size for packing and shipping. When the owner gets it home, it blows up like a balloon with the application of a little heat. This process takes roughly 10 minutes, et voila! There’s your chair.
The many faces of the self-expanding chair. (Click to enlarge.)
At the moment, that heat must be higher than 158 degrees Fahrenheit, so the furniture doesn’t start popping up like disastrous popcorn in the warehouse on a hot summer’s day. To affect even heating, at this stage, a controlled temperature box is required to expand the furniture.
However, de Smet is hoping to make the method of expansion more accessible to the av… [Read more]
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