Smart Design

One of the main tasks of design is to solve problems and very often the striving to find the best solution results in some very smart designs, as my readers have already seen. Today I just came across the next smart design proposal -   Jumpseat, a chair especially developed for auditoriums by  the creative team at Ziba:

source

"As a design firm, it was also important to us that the seating visually complement the space. Its clean, minimal surfaces and honest use of materials demanded something both elegant and technically creative.The Functional Genius of Bridges and Spines.The immediate challenge was geometric: how do you make a seat that supports an adult, but nearly disappears when not in use? Typical seating is at least 12 inches thick when closed; our risers only allowed four. This ruled out off-the-shelf hinges and other support mechanisms as either to bulky or too weak, and directed the designers to look outside for inspiration.
The two fields with the most to offer were structural engineering and human anatomy. Bridges and tall buildings are incredibly efficient, bearing enormous weight with a minimum of material, in strictly constrained footprints. The cantilever bridge in particular is able to support vast loads in awkward places through the careful pairing of elements that support tension and compression.
We also found an analog in the human spine. Spines are thin and flexible, yet strong, and offer a free range of motion right up until they lock in place at their furthest extremity. They do this by stacking a series of discrete, rigid elements — vertebrae — and tying them together with strong but flexible ligaments.
What these two structures have in common is the use of thick, rigid compression elements and thin, ductile tension elements. Substituting plywood and sheet steel for bone and fiber, we had a promising strategy for making an articulated cantilever seat."