Scuttlebutt on the web regarding German designer Ronen Kadushin‘s Hack Chair is varied, to put it mildly, with responses as encouraging as “I love it!, especially the fact that you just twist all the pieces around and they slot together,” and as condemning as “nice idea, bad execution.. looks like a chair for masochists.” Kadushin—whose Open Design production method aspires towards “cooperative, community-minded, legitimate ways of sharing creativity”—created Hack under the aegis of a Creative Commons license, which (along with the communicative force of the internet) grants anyone, anywhere the ability to reproduce it.

Hack Chair Prototype. Designed by Ronen Kadushin.

So given Kadushin’s apparent preference for a sort of socialist/utopian model of production, one might conjecture he’d take the bad with the good. The bad, in this case, being the perceived peril to posterior parts posed by the finely honed edges of the Hack Chair’s laser cut, hand bent 6mm aluminum; the good, herein, taking the form of sustainability (like philosophical compatriot George Rice’s 4Fold, Hack is constructed from a single sheet), ergonomics (despite the rather hyperbolic fear of laceration, Hack is friendly to bodily curves, most especially as regards its flexible back rest), and of course the aforementioned Open Design method, which gets serious about free access by offering Kadushin’s CAD design files for free download, copy, and
modification—see the designer’s Download Page for the real goods.

There’s also the matter of the piece’s aesthetics to consider. And when I do just that, much as in the case of the Kyoto Seat, I find myself absconding from the naysayers and venturing forth into the rarefied terrain of Kadushin’s devotees. The chair—whether fully assembled or “hacked” into its flat component parts—has a futuristic urban/industrial look that smacks of something from the set of Ridley Scott’s sublime Blade Runner. Hack also resembles the burgeoning tendencies of certain young designers to scrounge for their materials (see Chris Rucker). While Kadushin certainly hasn’t gone as far as this denizen of detritus, his work does possess a certain post-apocalyptic aura that appeals on many levels. And if it’s available for the free use of one and all via the magic of the world wide web, so much the merrier.

Via Design Boom