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1. Cardboard is cheap/free, recyclable, strong, and if treated well, very durable. It can be fastened with glues or mechanical fasteners, and readily takes a few coats of polyurethane to create a harder, more durable finish. Most of these chairs were made from 100% waste cardboard. Cardboard dumpsters are plentiful on college campuses, especially behind cafeterias. Other good scavenging sites are big-box stores, strip malls, and appliance stores. You'll want to gather the flattest, biggest contiguous sheets you can find, mostly free of tears, water stains, and other weak spots. The other key is a box cutter and a lot of patience. Many people have never attempted to build their own furniture because they feel it would be too difficult or too expensive to make anything worthwhile. In this video segment from zoom, a yound designer named Nick demonstrates his process for designing and constructing attractive, sturdy chairs from cardboard. A good structural design begins with a problem and a concept of how to solve the problem.


2. Decide how to hold up the weight of a person. One very popular way is to fold cardboard into triangle columns with the open air spaces facing down toward the ground and up toward the seat of the chair. You can also support weight by coiling cardboard with the corrugation facing top to bottom as with the triangle columns. Alternatively you can use very small boxes that are stacked, although this may not be desirable because of the comparatively large open space inside the boxes. Remember, the key is very small open spaces, including corrugation. These supports can be attached with glue or tape, or they can poke through the seat with cardboard pegs through the supports underneath. However, in order to fulfill its intended goal, a design must do more than just solve a problem. In the history of engineering, countless ideas have failed because of poor planning, poor execution, or both. The engineering design process involves many important steps. One of the first is to clearly determine the function that a structure must serve.


3. You can create an environmentally friendly chair out of a large cardboard box in just a few minutes. This pattern makes a simple side chair with a straight back, which is sturdy enough to support an average adult. Open the cardboard box so it lays flat, then measure it. You want the box to be at least 45 inches wide and 60 inches high. Place the cardboard in front of you in a vertical layout. Use the bottom edge of the flattened box as the bottom side of a rectangle that is 45 inches long and 15 inches high. Draw the rectangle, then draw dividing lines inside it at 15-inch intervals to make three 15-inch squares. For example, government officials may want a new highway to cross a river at a certain point. It is a bridge engineer's job to create a design that solves that problem in the most effective and efficient way. Often, design solutions address much smaller problems.