Fresh Foam Bench

This post focuses more on a piece of a larger project. The task was to design a piece of furniture that is inspired by one of New Balances signature technologies. For me, their 'Fresh Foam' technology had a lot of design potential and lent it self to furniture due to its association with performance and comfort.

The midsole uses a hexagonal grid pattern as its main identifier, and the hexagon cells also undulate from concave to convex. Both were features I intended to build into the final. I used Rhino3D and the Grasshopper plugin to replicate this behavior and developed a solution that first applied these two features onto a surface.

Once I firmly established how to create the hex-grid with an organic pattern of concave cells and convex cells, it was pretty simple to map it onto a three dimensional wrapper that formed the outer skin of the bench.