Collaboration was a key theme throughout Seoul Design this year. In the Young Designers section, students were paired with corporations, while a whole hall was reserved for 60 collaborative projects made between working designers. One such project was Story of Chair.

Its creators Jang Seung-tae and Kim Jae-yong – an artist and designer, and commercial designer, respectively – both met online on the DDP Platform, where creatives could upload their works and hunt down collaborators whom they felt an affinity with. Together, they created a chair-art piece, with a base that resembles a slab of orange marble.

“Plastic chairs are significant and symbolic in Korea,” says Seung-tae. The artist tells us about the blue plastic chairs you commonly find outside of convenience stores in Seoul, and how you often hear chair legs scraping against the concrete late at night (the blue plastic element in Story of Chair is derived from this reference). The marble bottom of the chair is made from production excess – leftover shredded sponge wrapped in PVC plastic. “People tend to think when you see a sofa, you see the materials used for that piece,” says Jae-yong; Story of Chair attempts to show the excess that is ordinarily hidden.

Like many other projects across Seoul Design, Story of Chair engages with sustainability. But its designers push further, asking if production can ever be sustainable. “I know in Europe and globally there’s a lot of talk going on about eco-friendliness,” says Seung-tae. “But it can’t be a trend. It needs to be the baseline.”