Silver Furniture Design · 2025
Sempoa Lounge Chair
- A' Design Award 2025 Silver Winner in Furniture Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: New Elegant Co., Ltd.
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 53,124
- Verification code ECB786DE26 · Verify this award
About Sempoa Lounge Chair
The Sempoa chair blends traditional inspiration with modern functionality. Inspired by the Japanese Soroban abacus, it features a backrest with moving beads that offer both tactile engagement and a subtle massaging effect. The beads, mounted on stainless steel rods and held by flexible bentwood frames, move with the user's body. Crafted from intersecting solid wood boards, the design balances structured aesthetics with durability, ensuring stability, style, and inviting user interaction.
New Elegant Co., Ltd's Sempoa Lounge Chair, recipient of the Silver A' Design Award in Furniture Design, emerges as a compelling meditation on the intersection of functional seating and cultural artifact, drawing upon the rich heritage of the sempoa or abacus as both formal inspiration and symbolic content. The design demonstrates remarkable sophistication in its integration of calculating instrument aesthetics into a fully resolved lounging form, where the traditional framework of beads upon rods becomes not mere decoration but structural participant in the backrest's visual and tactile character. Technical execution reveals masterful command of wood joinery traditions, with the bold triangular side panels demonstrating precise miter work and the curved armrests exhibiting controlled steam-bending or lamination techniques that achieve organic flow within geometric constraint. The two-tone finish treatment, darker at the base and graduating to warmer median tones above, suggests conscious engagement with visual grounding principles while honoring the natural beauty of the selected hardwood through transparent rather than opaque coloration. One observes in this work a thoughtful negotiation between the rectilinear logic of the abacus grid and the ergonomic demands of human repose, the slight backward recline of the backrest and the cradling curve of the seat acknowledging bodily comfort even as the form maintains rigorous geometric discipline. The design participates in broader contemporary movements celebrating cultural heritage revival within modernist formal vocabularies, suggesting affinities with designers who mine ancestral craft traditions for contemporary relevance without lapsing into nostalgic reproduction. Viewers might consider how this piece transforms the act of sitting into an encounter with mathematical heritage, inviting contemplation of how calculation, once performed through the tactile manipulation of beads, has shaped human cognition and cultural development across millennia, and how furniture might serve not merely functional but memorial purposes within domestic environments.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- For a long period of time, Abacus has been an important part of life of businessman, employees, even students. This simple yet useful hand operated tool becomes a symbol of hardworking people. In modern days, where digital calculator has been embedded inside our most important tool-smartphone, an abacus is slowly being forgotten. An idea emerges repurposing an abacus in our daily life as a reminder of our hard works while still physically functional giving relaxation massage sensation for the user.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Width: 720 mm
Depth: 820 mm
Height: 800 mm
Seat Height: 440 mm
Seat Depth: 510 mm - Tags
- Chair, Life, Work, Massage, Abacus, Wood, Joinery
- Production Technology
- The expectation to create the most favorite piece of furniture in our living room, build quality is the priority allowing the user to rely on it for decades. With that mindset, straight solid rubberwood is decided for its well-known balance between strength, lightweight and cost. The curved shapes are realized from a bentwood forming the backrest and seat frames that wraps around the user’s body. The large area of the seat allows the user to sit cross-legged, thus velvet fabric is chosen to give a gentle touch to the skin, maximizing comforts.
- Design Challenge
- From the beginning of research, blending an abacus in a piece of furniture, the inorganic shape of the abacus reduces the possibility of the chair shape exploration. As ergonomic is a crucial part in designing a chair, the shape cannot be too rigid but on the other hand it becomes irrelevant to the abacus if the chair is too organic. Second hurdle is finding the balance thickness of the bentwood rails of the abacus. It must be thin enough to flex, yet strong enough to support the user’s body while holding all the stainless-steel rods. The frame also required to have spaces for the rails to slide smoothly without affecting the overall rigidity.
- Project Duration
- The project was designed and developed in Ho Chi Minh from August 2023 until August 2024.
- Operation Flow
- Crafting Sempoa chair focused on touches between users’ body and the edges of the beads. Knowing the fact that responses to sharp edges are different for every person, the rails of the abacus are made of flexible thin bentwood to be able to adapt to the user’s rear body shape. The stainless-steel rods act as the bones of the bentwood rails giving strength to support the user’s weight. Not only that, the abacus horizontal direction combined with the stainless steel rods, permit the beads to slide and spin freely, allowing the user to move around unbound while sitting.
- Research
- Creating a product that will be cherished by the user is the wish of all designers and producers. Providing a solution in the product that also connects to the user’s heart, the research focused on blending the historical elements of abacus as an aesthetic feature and a concrete function of the whole product. Thus, by reinventing abacus as a flexible backrest, not only it acts as a piece of art in the living room, but also provides a soothing massage effect for the user. It combines a cultural element with practical benefits, creating a chair that feels both familiar and innovative.
- Inspiration
- In this era, most of our daily activity is sitting. Either it is working, meeting, eating or even relaxing. Twelve hours on average sitting on the same spot happened to many people especially those who works from their home. Inspired by wooden massage lumbar support used by many taxi drivers in Vietnam, the idea is to implement wooden massage beads built into a lounge chair for people who works tirelessly and relax infinitely in front of screens all day long.
- Image Credits
- Aditya Cipta Sugandha, 2024.