Let us imagine that we want to buy a chair. We go to a shop and leave with a flat, light form made of two layers of sheeting – a rolled package which can easily fit into a bag. At home, with the use of a handy pump, we inflate it with air and shortly afterwards the chair is ready. In spite of all appearances, it is stable, comfortable and durable.
This futuristic vision can quickly become true thanks to a new technology developed by Oskar Zięta: FiDU (Freie Innendruck Umformung – Free Inner Pressure Forming). The author describes the effects of his invention in the following manner:
An object that was just a flat piece of metal adopts its optimal shape by itself. It is a serial but unique product, as sheeting never curves in exactly the same way.
British magazine Wired referred to Zięta’s projects as the ‘furniture of the future’. Its simplicity and technological innovativeness have already brought him numerous prizes, including a Red Dot Design Award (2008), Schweizer Design Prize (2008), German Design Council Prize (2009) and Audi Mentor Prize (2011).
For this invention to be designed the work of a big team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich - www.ethz.ch) was essential. Zięta went to the university for a two-year stipend after graduating from the department of architecture at Szczecin University of Technology. Since 2003 he has been working at the ETH as a research and teaching assistant in the department of Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), where he is now writing his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Ludger Hovestadt. There, he developed his studies on the usage of digital technology in steel treatment that brought him in 2004 to the creation of FiDU.
Apparently, crucial for Zięta’s work was the chance to experience the peculiar educational system of Switzerland:
Most importantly, studying in Switzerland is based on a constant presentation of one’s own progress, exploring a certain topic in front of a wide assembly. In Poland everyone is focused on one’s own studies, whereas the effects of those studies are known only to limited groups of people and rarely see the light of the day.
To the contrary, in CAAD the stress falls on implementing new technologies in practical solutions and developing the most ergonomic forms of usage. Because contemporary design frequently uses non-standard, bionic forms that demand new design solutions, increasing the importance of production as it enables artists to create curiosities that meet particular needs. Zięta recollects:
I was working on creating a valuable construction element out of flat pieces of sheeting. Finally, we thought about welding two pieces of sheeting together and inflating them with water through a vent. It was later proved that this element was very stable and had an amazing shape.
The FiDU technology found its first application in furniture design. In 2008 Zięta entered the market with his own products: the stool Plopp (produced by the Danish firm Hay) and the limited series of the chair Chippensteel (in cooperation with SZ-Designedition/Magazin.com). The aforementioned creations are light and look like beach toys despite being made of laser-cut steel. According to Zięta the greatest advantages of the product are: ‘more effective production, recycling possibilities, purity of form’ and… comfort. The inflated piece of sheeting is also a very durable material, which the designer proudly emphasizes:
I was very glad to see disbelief on engineers’ faces who were wrong about the duration of my products. I heard that my stool could only withstand sixty kilos without deforming. It withstood over two tons.
Plopp (in Polish, an acronym for ‘Polish Folk Object Inflated with Air’) brought popularity and numerous prizes to the artist and found its way to the Pompidou Centre in Paris as one of the twelve chairs that have changed the contemporary design. For Zięta Plopp was a test of a new approach to projecting, named by him as ‘Prozessdesign’ and defined in a following way:
The final form follows the process of production. My role is to invent efficient processes that use innovative technology, aesthetics and function are their derivatives.
