Flexible high chair for home environments : Development of a first prototype solution that facilitate storage and transportation

Abstract: When small children eat, they usually sit in a high chair to reach the same table level as the adults. There are many different kinds of high chairs on the market with different functionalities, such as high chairs that grows with the child and high chairs that are attached to ordinary chairs. Some households have more than one alternative, just because their ordinary high chair isn’t easy to transport. Furthermore, due to compact living situations, it can be advantageously having the possibility of easily store it away when the high chair isn’t in use. Therefore, the purpose with this project was to develop a first prototype proposal of a flexible high chair, that easily can be stored and transported, but still fit within home environments. The project presented in this report is a master thesis project conducted during spring 2019 within the master program Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal Institute of technology, in conjunction with Svensk Konstruktionstjänst and their client Twistshake. The project followed an iterative product development process. It included research to obtain deeper understandings of the users, analysis of the results and determination of project direction, concept generation and concept selection. A mock-up and prototype were made to test ideas. Based on this, the final result of the project was developed. In the project, two of UN’s 17 global sustainable development goals were taken into consideration: number 3, good health and well-being and number 12, responsible consumption and production. The result of the project is a first prototype solution of a flexible high chair. It is a high chair that grow with the child from around 6 months to 4 years old. It is developed to facilitate the child’s development and by that offer long user time, which also favour the environment. When not in use, the high chair can easily be folded into a flat package for storage or transportation. As the project was limited to 20 full time weeks, further work needs to be done before reaching a real product. The first prototype and suggestions of further work has been discussed.