Industrial designer Hamish Tennent is an up and comer, to be sure. I know this because recent events have allowed him to follow a familiar trajectory of increasing visibility: from Coroflot, to an enhanced prominence of his personal website on google searches, to the ubiquitous presence on same of the recently conceived Rocker Stool. Despite this newfound notoriety, young Hamish very much sounds like an unassuming type: "I am a highly passionate, motivated, slightly crazy design student from Auckland, New Zealand. I Like… Designing, sports, gadgets, branding, new and exciting products, music. I Was… Born, bred, and raised in New Zealand, I was exceptionally lucky to have parents that let me do what ever I like."

Rocker Stool. Designed by Hamis Tennent.

Unorthodox Materials Mesh with a Pronounced Sense of Play

Happily, Tennent seems to have inculcated some rigor somewhere in among all of that doing whatever he liked. Else the Rocker Stool would not articulate such a clever synthesis between cork and ceramic, of all things. Nor would it have found a way to make the jaunty gesture of the last sitter's history a tangible artifact. Rocker achieves the latter via a simple system of shifting sand: the piece's ceramic base is filled with the stuff, such that after the user finishes gesticulating this way and that, balancing on any one of the underside's nine flat surface segments, the Stool stays stationary in the last position upon said user's departure.

The mechanism leaves an intriguing trace of the proclivities of those who've gone before, as it were, providing a bit of archeological evidence of time's passing-albeit, on a much different scale from that of fossilized bones or petrified wood. The feature is one among a handful of entertaining aspects of the piece, whose resemblance to both a salt shaker and the kitschy 70s toys called "Weebles" ("Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down," went the annoying jingle), gives a good sense of the Rocker Stool's cheerful aesthetic terrain.

Via Yanko.