A recycled iMac turned into a chair and no, Jony Ive didn’t design it

Let's be brutally honest, many design chairs that have made the history of furniture design were never meant to be the most comfortable to sit on. If we would go with Bruno Munari's take, the reason is that they served a different purpose, to be different from all other chairs, chasing originality and creativity at the expense of comfort. One can wonder what Munari would say of Lim Wootek's Dip 1, a chair that uses an old 27" aluminum iMac as its overengineered yet repurposed backrest, and a block of cast blue resin as the seat. In the cast, a Magic Mouse and a Magic Keyboard lie on top of an office drawer. The resin lets through a faint and blurry reminder of their presence while the blueish glow of the material reminds of shallow waters, possibly the Bondi Beach blue ones that inspired Jony Ive and Steve Jobs in making the first plastic iMac in the late '90s. While that might surprise you, these choices do have somewhat of an explanation. "Dip1 transforms the iMac, a symbolic tool of the studio, into the backrest of a chair. The monitor, which once conveyed information at eye level, remains clearly visible, while the keyboard and storage bins located at the feet are deeply submerged, appearing as blurred silhouettes.", says Wootek in the piece's presentation. "This visualizes the distance between vivid memories and those fading in our minds. Furthermore, these preserved tools transcend their original utility, demonstrating how used objects can remain with us in a new form."

The resin top stands at 45cm from the floor, which is a regular ergonomic height and lets you actually sit on the thing, if you so desire. Be aware that you would be sitting on a piece of art more than an actual chair, leaning on a once expensive backrest swiveling mechanism. So yes, once again someone made a design chair that has many goals, except the one that a chair should have: letting you rest comfortably. And regarding Munari, well, he was mostly talking about armchairs, "poltrone" in Italian. Yet, we know full well what he would have thought of this piece. "Interior design does not mean inventing a new form of a certain piece of furniture", he wrote, "but rather putting a common piece of furniture, a vulgar lounge chair, in the right place". Wootek instead decided to put a computer, mouse and keyboard into a chair, which as an action doesn’t even inhabit the same conceptual plane of Munari’s definition.  Nevertheless, we still like the idea and the piece, mostly for its absurdity. To be fair, Munari might have probably liked it too, once we'd all agreed it has absolutely nothing to do with sitting, let alone comfortably.