The comfort of being naturally supported leads to better ideas. Introducing our sustainable table & chair series - Phlox

Phlox is a table and chair collection designed taking inspiration from nature. It is named after the night phlox, a flower with uniquely beautiful blossoms and a wonderful aroma.

Okamura’s order was a table and chair series for the global market with excellent design which can be used to build a variety of communication forums. Our design partner was Rainlight, a design company based in London and New York which has won many design awards in collaboration with Okamura.

Rainlight’s proposed concept was something with a motif from the rich natural world. At first, we were perplexed by such an ambitious concept, but before long we set our direction and began development. We struggled to put together a structure which could be put into production while also holding true to the design concept.

We also brainstormed ideas for contributing to sustainability during the initial phase. These included using common parts, developing a cover material which used threads recycled from fishing nets, and thorough use of recycled materials.

Phlox was developed without the design team ever meeting in real life. This was because the COVID-19 pandemic was wreaking havoc globally and overseas travel was practically impossible. In product development, it is sometimes necessary to have people’s passions crash into each other so they can come to a deeper understanding of each other’s ideas. Not being able to truly discuss things in the same time and place was a challenge, but we overcame that obstacle by making adjustments to our web meetings. The time difference between Japan and England is 8/9 hours. So, there is limited time for holding web meetings. However, there are advantages to the time difference too. Questions sent in the evening from Japan would be answered by the next morning. It was like splitting the 24-hour clock in half. We created explanatory videos and sent them in advance to help with understanding ideas in a short time.

We produced 1/5-scale models using 3D printers to quickly check the fine details, which allowed us to successfully finish the first phase of Phlox development despite there being many points to check. Looking back, whether your meetings are online or in real life, the most important thing is for the developers to trust each other. No matter how advanced the IT or how sound the social infrastructure, if there is no trust then you cannot work together successfully.

The lineup of lounge table, meeting table, and high table uses as many common parts as possible and is designed with sustainability at its core. Topple-resistance and stability were considered for different combinations of leg lengths and table tops, and various leg thicknesses and attachment points were tested before being finalized. It was an exhausting process.

For the organically shaped tables, multiple arcs were combined in complex ways and made into diagrams. While they may have looked like clean curves in the diagram, they sometimes looked warped when actually produced. So, we created various patterns for the combinations of arcs, searching for the optimal solution in order to produce them smoothly on the actual manufacturing machines.

Another area where we ran into issues was using the same parts for the conference chairs. The 2 sizes of conference chair, medium and high back, can be combined with 5 different forms of legs. The leg types are: 5 legs or 4 legs with rotating casters, 4 legs without casters, and 4 legs made of metal pipe or wood, which have significantly different impressions from the first three options. While the attachment parts are all the same, the metal pipe or wooden legs are designed to look like each leg is inserted into the chair’s shell.