Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Gargoyle presents his chair design to students and instructors

Industrial designer Robb Godshaw was recently set to co-teach a class in rapid prototyping at San Francisco State University, when a somewhat inconvenient global pandemic broke out.

As originally planned, students would first learn how to use CAD software, and then learn how to use to computer-aided manufacturing software to actually create a full-size wooden chair via 3D printing and CNC machining. So at the end, each student would literally get to leave class with the chair they’d created from start to finish.  

That was supposed to be the “satisfying and empowering” portion of the semester, as Godshaw puts it to me, but the problem was, the university was (back last May) still in lockdown. “This made COVID especially frustrating,” he goes on. “I thought hard of what lessons students had learned in the previous semesters, and tried to find a way that some of those lessons could be learned virtually.” 

But where Zoom or another online video conferencing platform might work for most other subjects, his class needed some level of in-person teaching:

“There are students whose chairs suffered from serious structural issues, craft issues, aesthetic issues, ergonomic issues, and simple scale issues, as it is very difficult to know how large the chair you are designing on a computer screen is.”

That meant “finding a tool that would allow people to move in real space with human sized avatars that would allow for sitting and chatting”, but also didn’t necessarily require a new gaming PC or a VR headset. 

The online learning alternative he ultimately landed on, as you can see below, just turned 17 years old:

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