Hybrid Furniture

Compact and Useful

The last assignment from the HZ in my first semester of the fourth year was to choose a random company to design a product for. Having an interest in furniture at the time I chose Leen Bakker. Leen Bakker is a furniture and interior chain located in the Netherlands, Belgium and the Dutch Antilles. For this assignment I had to first research the trends on the current market and explore Leen Bakker as a company to see what trends fit the company. After doing that it was time to use those findings to come up with a design. The Trends I focussed on where Smaller Housing, Hybrid and Modular Furniture and Adaptability which are very similar and have connection which each other. The other 2 trends I chose were durability and Circular Economy since Leen Bakker seemed to very interested in this topic.

Info:

Project: Design & Inovation

Year: 2019

Duration: 1 Semester

Coach: Willem Haak

My project started with exploring the website from Leen Bakker. To see what brands they have and what they design themselves. Here I also found the mission, vision and the history of Leen Bakker. The next step was to describe the customers Leen Bakker likes to focus on and a SWOT analysis. With the SWOT I analysed some Trends that I found interesting. I divided these trends in Mega Trends and Living Trends. With potential customers I checked which furniture they would like and combined the top 3 in multiple concepts. When I was almost finished my lecturer reminded me that I wanted to make furniture that was as durable as possible. This was the reason I had almost everything made out of wood. My lecturer challenged me to replace the metal parts like the bolts and the metal corner profiles made to hold up the slatted base of the bed with wooden pins. I calculated that I would need 150 wooden pins of 8mm thick to hold up a slatted base of a one person bed.