When I moved out of a dorm and into an apartment, I had to get my own furniture, especially seating. I toyed around with different ideas for chair construction until I noticed the pile of cardboard shipping tubes we had been collecting at my work. Seeing the tubes stacked up against the wall got me thinking about using them to make a reconfigurable chair. I used a number of different tube diameters, so that there were many different stacking options. I also realized that for the stack to be stable, the tubes must be restricted from shearing against each other, and thus allowing the stack to collapse. Originally, I used a product called Dual Lock from 3m to stick them together. Instead of having a hook side and a loop side like Velcro, Dual Lock only has one type of surface that sticks to itself: little mushroom-shaped knobs that interlock. So, I wrapped a strip of Dual Lock on each end of every tube, so that one can assemble an arbitrary shape by simply pressing the tubes together.

Of course, certain configurations were more stable than others, and one needed to keep in mind how the forces generated by their weight will be transferred through the structure, to keep it strong. I found that constructing new layouts of the tube more enjoyable than sitting in the actual chair, because even the small tubes were too large a diameter to make a comfortable seating surface. Anoter nice feature of the chair were that the the smaller tubes could be stored in the larger ones, and some storage areas that were formed by capping the larger tubes with two lids connected by a elastic cord. When I moved into a new apartment with roommates I put the chair out with the recycling, because we didn't have room for it, and it was just too uncomfortable to use.