Experiential · Furniture Design · Craft
An eight-week apprenticeship that traded Figma for a table saw.
In 2022 I spent a summer in the Design Apprenticeship Program at the National Building Museum working out of Studio231. Twenty-four of us were picked, split into small teams, and asked to design, build, and present modular seating for museum visitors.
I came in with a graphic design background and zero carpentry experience; eight weeks later I'd used a table saw, a biscuit joiner, and more wood glue than I'd ever touched a physical material for a school project before.
Most museum seating is an afterthought: a bench against a wall, built for nobody in particular. Nobody had thought about the person standing in an exhibit holding a one-year-old on their hip for twenty minutes, or a nursing mother needing a calm space to breastfeed.
We picked those people as our audience: nursing mothers, and caregivers with young kids. Not the most obvious brief in the room, but it was the one nobody else in the program was solving for.
A chair either holds you or it doesn't. There's no responsive breakpoint, no edge case — just a body, and whether the thing was actually built for it.
I was assigned to a team of five other apprentices, over eight weeks we were mentored by graphic designers, engineers, and residential planners, which meant a lot of our early meetings were just us asking people who build things for a living whether our ideas would survive contact with a real museum floor.
My role on the team was furniture designer and graphic designer. I helped shape and cut the physical chair, and I was the one who illustrated and laid out our final presentation board.
None of us had built furniture before, so the process was equal parts design and just learning to use the shop. We started the way I start most projects, sketching, talking through who we were actually designing for, and then had to translate that into something that could survive being cut, glued, and sat in.
Planning the faces of the seating meant thinking in joints and grain direction; we prototyped in cheap material first, checked that the rocking motion actually felt calming instead of tippy, then moved to the real wood once we trusted the shape.
Process, in order: constructing with power tools, building early prototypes, and planning the faces of the seating.
For the final build we used wood glue and biscuit joints instead of visible hardware, which meant every seam had to be measured and cut right the first time (there's no hiding a bad joint under a screw head). It was slower, and it was also the first time I understood why furniture makers care so much about a clean joint.
Binding glue and wooden biscuits together — the joinery that holds Left & Right Twix together without a single visible screw.
We built Left & Right Twix, a pair of rocking chairs designed around one specific visitor: a nursing mother or a caregiver with a young child, looking for somewhere to sit down that wasn't a hallway bench.
The rocking motion was the whole point: it's soothing for a fussy kid, and it gives an exhausted parent something to do with their body besides stand still. We placed the finished chairs directly in front of the museum's dollhouse exhibit, where kids already gravitated on their own, so the seating met their caregivers exactly where they already were.
The presentation board, designed and illustrated by me, with the technical drawings that got Left & Right Twix from sketch to shop floor.
We presented Left & Right Twix to museum staff and mentors at the end of the program, seating and all, set up in front of the dollhouse exhibit where they were designed to live. It was the first time I'd taken something all the way from a sketch to a physical object someone could actually sit in.
