Camping Chair

The Camping Chair is a portable outdoors chair designed to balance durability, portability, and affordability.

The goal of this project was to build a durable outdoor camping chair with additional features that matched our user groups needs. From multiple interviews with college students, we learned that students prioritized convenience, comfort, and affordability when shopping for outdoors gear.

After analyzing different chair designs on the market, we determined that the chair must meet the following requirements:

Transportability: under 20lbs and no larger than 5ft in diameter for ease of carrying when collapsed
Novelty: utilize an innovative folding mechanism not seen on the market today
Cost: cost less than $180 dollars to build
Safety: able to hold at least 200lbs
Comfort: enjoyable to sit in for at least one hour
Ease of assembly: take less than a 2 minutes to set up
Easy to clean: does not require taking apart or using complex machines to clean

Product Specifications

The camping chair was composed of t-slot framing rails for the legs and the framing of the seat. The seat was sewn from a weather-resistant nylon fabric and elastic strap. The framing pieces and legs are connected with locking pivots. Due to the material and time constraints on the project, this final prototype served as a good proof of concept and met some of our product specifications, but ultimately failed in user testing. Future work would need to be done to select materials that are more aligned with the product needs.

To learn more about the construction of our chair, read our final report.