South Korean designer Taekhan Yun on how creative mistakes made beautiful chairs.

Wouldn’t it be great if children were asked to design furniture they could actually use and then see it made for real? That was the simple idea behind Chairs for Kids, a project by South Korean designer Taekhan Yun.

The two month project began after Yun visited his parents’ English school in Cambodia, where he noticed many of the children fidgeting on their classroom chairs. Watching them sparked a question for the designer: why not let the children design their own functional furniture and give them the input rather than adults? At the same time, Yun was also aware of the lack of art education in public schools, where learning often centres on repetition and copying rather than exploration or imagination. Creative outlets are usually provided by non-profit arts organisations and it was here that Yun saw an opportunity to do something different.

The process began with a simple task for the kids: drawing a chair or stool. For some of the children, this proved difficult. Many wanted their drawings to be perfect, or they wanted to use a ruler, a familiar response from kids who feel their drawings need to be ‘perfect’. In this case, technical skill wasn’t the point, Yun said ‘they just needed to get their ideas down‘. He even showed his own clumsy design drawings to make them feel at ease.

With 70 students completing 140 drawings, it was then on to the design process. From there, the ideas took physical form. Seventy clay prototypes were made to help understand and visualise design principles and the development of ideas, which some kids found frustrating. He felt they just wanted to get on with it and not keep designing. Yun noticed a shift once the children began to understand design as a process, rather than focusing solely on the final result. Seven designs were eventually selected for production, with the final chairs painted in crayon and acrylic and sealed with varnish, giving each piece its own personality and sense of ownership. Best of all, the finished chairs are now being used in the very classrooms where they were conceived, by the children who designed them.

Chairs for Kids is such a great project, showing how involving children in making decisions about their environment can nurture confidence, creativity, and critical thinking. Reminding us that sometimes the most thoughtful design comes from simply asking the right people.