Ex_Lab: Experimental Furniture Futures

Ex_Lab encourages students to re-examine everyday materials and invent new ones. This process driven design suggests an alternative approach to provoke innovation, by compelling designers to uncover latent opportunities that only become evident through open ended experimentation, while developing an understanding of what things are made from. Students demonstrate their capability to design and fabricate a piece of furniture that is the outcome of a process of experimentation and research with both fabrication techniques and materials.

Image Credits - Ex_Lab 2023 Semester 2 - Evan Jape

Further Information

For additional details on the subject content, please consult the Subject Handbook at the link provided below.

Handbook ABPL90361

Previous Iterations

2024 - Semester 1

Tutors: Edward Yee
Subject Coordinator: Associate Professor Rochus Hinkel

2023 -  Semester 2

Tutors: Edward Yee, Jessica Broad
Subject Coordinator: Associate Professor Rochus Hinkel

‘Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, and love.’
— Louis Kahn.

Ex_Lab: Experimental Furniture Futures challenges students to engage with methods of process-driven design and advanced digital fabrication. Rigorous research, experimentation, and prototyping underpins the hands-on approach of this subject and is complemented by additive and subtractive manufacturing tools. Emergent qualities and characteristics from manufacturing processes and materials are exploited formally through a full-scale, refined furniture piece.