Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Industrial Design
Department
Industrial Design
First Advisor
Paolo Cardini
Second Advisor
Tim Maly
Third Advisor
Jim Drain
Abstract
Is absurdity frivolous? In contemporary workplace contexts, office workers– from new hires to mid-level managers– are required to maintain composure, attention and productivity amid bureaucratic instability, distractions, and disruptions. This expectation manifests in the form of an office chair. Since its inception, chairs have represented and disseminated power. Within bureaucratic systems, chairs discipline the body physically and metaphorically, creating the conditions for workers to optimize workflow by remaining comfortable and still for long periods of time.
CHAIR FOR WORKPLACE MORALE disturbs the act of sitting, producing a bounded and altered perceptual environment. Operating within an institutional logic in which humor is positioned ironically as a productivity aid, the chair generates a slapstick spectacle that undermines the employee’s capacity to work rather than alleviating underlying conditions.
My chair takes an anti-design stance, prioritizing the irony that saturates everyday objects and the systems we are forced to participate in. Through a discursive design approach, I gesture at the feeling of ambient hopelessness, caused by stagnating compensation and increasing workload for lower- and middle-tier white collar workers, highlighting the structural realities of labor under late-stage, AI-inflected capitalism. This project is in conversation with Discursive Design of the 2010s, Italian Radical Design movement of the 1970s and the Droog Design collective of the 1990s. Moments of disruption, such as absurdity, play, and humor, briefly surface with my chair, yet remain entangled within the systems of power and oppression that produce them; these forms of protest are eventually co-opted to take on a functional role, a way in which the system sustains itself.
Recommended Citation
Lee, Alicia, "CHAIR FOR WORKPLACE MORALE" (2026). Masters Theses. 1545.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1545
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