Cross Cultural Chairs

It was curiosity that led designer Matteo Guarnaccia to leave Sicily in search of new cultural experiences. Little did Matteo know at the time that he would end up spending six fruitful years in Spain. After studying design at Istituto Europeo del Design in Barcelona, Matteo went on to work with Curro Claret, a designer renowned for his socially-focused projects. It was while working with Curro on a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that Matteo became fascinated with the relationship between design and context, prompting him to question globalized consumption, its relationship to colonization and the importance of critiquing convenience design and its impact on societies. In order to delve deeper into his ideas, Matteo decided to embark on an eight-month, round-the-world journey, which he branded Cross Cultural Chairs. The ambitious project would lead him to eight countries in search of local design and production techniques, with the aim of incorporating his findings into a collection of tailored sitting devices. The result is an array of chairs that speaks of different cultures, design-thinking methods and incredibly varied ways of seating oneself.

Tell us about your inspiration for the CCC project?

I was searching for a solution for the transportation of patients in Eastern rural areas of DRC, together with Doctors Without Borders. That’s when I began to understand how critical surrounding context is to an idea. From there, I started to be curious about the importance of culture in design and how its influence is changing in a globalized and uniform world. Are we creating and consuming homogenised products that are far removed from their local applications?

Can you explain the logistics and focus of the project?

I decided to embark on a personal research project across eight different countries to understand the cultural importance of sitting. This involved collaborating with native design studios and artisans to portray local culture through chairs. Spending one month in each, I visited Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, China, India, Russia and Nigeria.

Having direct experience in each culture gave me a clearer idea of how to represent the local context, not only aesthetically, but in terms of local sitting habits. Over the centuries, different cultures have responded to this fundamental need in disparate ways, adapting the act of sitting depending on the local culture and surroundings. For example, we could hardly consider having dinner without a table and chair in the western world. But those things are not so obvious to all people in the opposing hemisphere.

How did you select the countries you wanted to visit?

It's hard to talk about a project that involves a lot of travelling without people thinking that you’re only doing it for a vacation. In fact, the rhythm of life during those eight months was the farthest thing from a holiday. First off, I had to come up with selection criteria to prevent me picking the countries I most wanted to visit. Since I was going to analyze local cultures and any culture is its people, I opted for the most populated countries. It's a scale that’s always changing, but it made sense, since it covered a wide area of the planet.

As someone who enjoys travelling, have your personal experiences influenced your creative approach?

Yes, I think each personal experience can be reflected in your work. I share a passion for travel with my parents, who met in Yemen and never stopped travelling the world. This upbringing led me to visit more than forty countries over the years, inspiring an interest in human culture that has come to influence my creative direction. As well as travelling, I’ve lived in Los Angeles, Barcelona and Madrid.

It’s easier than ever for people to relocate, not just economically and logistically, but socially. We can stay in touch and share things with people on the other side of the globe, and my generation is the first to really take advantage of that. But are we backing up this reverence for different cultures with action? Buying local cheese is one thing, but is that enough if we also consume fruit from another continent? Are there more local, affordable options? It’s the same when it comes to chairs. Do we want to sit as the rest of the world does or stand up for local artisans?

What did a typical month in the project look like? Did you follow a set process for each location?

I had to adapt my methods depending on the country, since they were all very different from each other, but I followed the same basic pattern, assigning each week to a specific stage in the process. The first week was dedicated to research, visiting museums, markets, sacred sites and any place that could help me better understand the local culture. I then shared my insights with the native designer and tried to match them with their ideas on how to represent local culture.

Week two was dedicated to form, shaping ideas into volumes and considering local materials and techniques. In the third week, we had to find a local artisan or factory that could produce the chair in a very short period of time. The final week was all about organizing a shoot and showcasing the collaboration to the local community.

Tell me more about your observations during the research phase.

The local aesthetics were something I could easily research and observe in application to physical objects such as chairs. But chairs are just one way of resting the body. Several cultures have solved the problem of sitting in ways that are more closely related to local customs and behaviour. Without the local designers, it would have been really difficult to comprehend this interplay in such a short space of time. They were fundamental to the project, acting like shortcuts to discovering the essence of each country.

It was such a pleasure to connect with local people and learn from my experiences as both a designer and a person. Wherever you are, people are the most important part of local culture. I spent much of my research time at markets, watching how locals communicate. There are always similarities in the ways people buy and sell goods, but in every place you find some interesting cultural distinctions.

Did you observe any distinct differences between the way people sit in eastern countries compared to western?

Historically ways of sitting have evolved along cultural lines. But if we take a look at an IKEA catalogue, it is the same all around the world. Irrespective of where you live, my generation is sharing more and more of the same things. We watch the same movies, listen to the same music, wear the same shoes, and our furniture is gradually becoming the same too. Yet, there are still differences between oriental and occidental modes of sitting.

In India, for example, I noticed that people cross their legs while sitting on chairs, in any kind of context, from restaurant to rickshaw. Most notably, people in rural areas tended to adopt the lotus position while using chairs. This hybrid posture reveals more directly the influence of colonization on Indian society, since chairs were introduced as an everyday item by the British.

How did you balance the things you identified as typical of each country and your own design thinking for the final product?

Sori Yanagi, the father of the mingei movement in Japan, stated in one of his ten design principles that "true beauty is born, not created." Part of the briefing that I proposed to myself and the local designers was to conceive of a chair that could represent the local culture by avoiding stereotypes. For that, we had to get the balance right between personal expression and analytic research.

There are multiple ways of analyzing a culture, all of which can lead to different results. In order to define inputs consistently, we kept the research as rational as possible. However, there were always decisions to be made during the creative process. We had to translate the research into shapes and enhance the local materials and techniques to create a chair that could be recognized by locals but at the same time be unique.