Gazing admiringly at a stool hung neatly on your apartment wall, like you would a modernist masterpiece in a gallery, is a concept not many of us can say we are familiar with. But this is the behaviour Jongha Choi's De-dimension stool provokes when its nifty 3D form is collapsed into an isometric illusion of the same stool, but in a 2D form.
Space-saving folding furniture designs like Choi's can be game changers in compact homes, but this wasn't the motivation for the project. During his Masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Choi began to question the way we confine images to flat surfaces, and how more and more contemporary cultural realities have begun to "shake our fundamental notion of the image". He wanted to create a direct experience with an image that would take place "in real space, intuitively and physically". De-dimension was born.
Drawing inspiration from pop-up books and isometric drawings, the stainless steel hinge folding mechanism and aluminium frame of the stool were designed, and came together to fashion the first model De-dimension A/B 2015.
After returning home to Korea, Choi's collection – which grew to include both stools and benches in a range of attractive colours – was shortlisted for the furniture award at the Dezeen Awards in 2019. We can also look forward to a soon-to-be-released cabinet piece joining the collection to brighten the walls of our homes and spaces.
