i. 2. Dis/Assembly
Publication Design
Common Dimensions Issue No. 1 — Dis/Assembly
Common Dimensions is a research platform and print publication that investigates the chair as a symbolic, discursive, and designed object. Its purpose is to explore the broad and diverse expressions of this everyday object that has become a design meme: the chair as architecture, the chair as status symbol, the chair as prosthesis, the chair as locus of power, the chair as a tool.
Common Dimensions offers no decisive definition of the chair as a singular, fixed object. Instead, it seeks to expand our understanding of (and connection to) chairs through a collection of interviews with artists, designers, and collectors, an ever-expanding online visual archive, and a growing database of texts that both enlarge upon and complicate the topic.
While much of the project inhabits the digital space, interviews also take the form of a printed periodical. This first issue features an interview with multidisciplinary designer, Maxwell Fertik, whose dis/assembly chair series explores topics such as flat pack furniture, labor, value, mass-manufacturing, and time.
This issue contains an interview portion (which borrow’s its format from an IKEA instructions manual), an insert with supplemental material, and a pre-cut sheet of plywood that can be transformed into mini versions of Fertik’s chairs.
To read the interview online, or to see more about this project, visit commondimensions.com.
—Edition of 12
—Newsprint, color paper, 1/8” plywood, plastic envelope
—Format (closed): 8.75” x 12.15”