Pop Up Bed?: Design Mysteries Series

So you grab the plastic box by the handle and roll it out of the store into your waiting car trunk or back seat or Subway ride home and then muscle it into your apartment, open it and presto, your new bed slowly inflates.

But my favorite part of the “bed in a box” scenario is when Sealy suggests you don’t throw out 10 pounds of plastic caddy but use it as under bed storage. They assume you have a bed frame that supports your foam mattress and is high enough off the floor to clear the “re-useable” caddy. By a show of hands how many of you think that people who buy the mattress in a box have a queen-size bed frame with a box spring or a solid piece of something to support this mattress? So to use the caddy as under bed storage you have to buy another thing or prop it up on 4 legs and some 2 x 4’s & plywood? Does this make “design” sense? Is this how designers define “design Intelligence?” Or is it an “opps” what are we going to tell the “Sustainable Minds Contingent” out there to shut them up when we try to sell another ecological disaster?

Pop Up Chair?

The “Bed in a Box” seems at first to be a pretty interesting ‘new” idea, but if you know anything about design you might remember Gaetano Pesce’s UP 5 2000 Armchair and Ottoman for B&B Italia Designed in 1969. The Chair came wrapped in a plastic bag that kept it deflated until you tore it open and “Magically” the chair slowly formed. What a surprise!! What “design thinking!”

“It was 1968, and Gaetano Pesce was in the shower. “I had the sponge in my hand,” explains the Italian designer. “When I pressed the sponge, it shrank, and when I released it, it returned to its original volume.”An idea occurred: Couldn’t a chair behave the same way? At his Paris atelier, Pesce began experimenting with vacuum-packing the hippest material of the moment: polyurethane. Soon he’d developed a gravity-defying model: a four-inch-thick disk that, when removed from its PVC envelope, would rise from the floor into a cushy armchair. Fittingly, he named it Up”. Excerpt from AD Magazine.

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Design Mysteries Series
Bruce Hannah 2018©