Foldschool: Why not? It’s free!
By Never teh Bride
What with papercraft looking to be the next big thing — you know, now that knitting is mainstream cool again — why not try your hand at something a tad more useful than the average origami swan? Foldschool is a teeny collection of furniture for kids that parents can construct using the cardboard boxen everyone seems to keep stashed in the basement…just in case.
There’s even a manifesto:
Mass culture is run by superficiality and ecological absurdity. Foldschool supports craftsmanship as a face-to-face approach to design and brings together product and user the closest possible. The mindset of foldschool is to restore design to one of its original missions: to provide a product at an affordable price through a smart manufacturing process.
The downloadable patterns can be printed out with any printer, and you may already have the required tools: cutter, ruler, cutting mat, spray adhesive, needle, glue, masking tape, and folding tool. According to the site, the resultant furniture is stable enough to be used by an adult…though the pieces themselves are small, so consider scaling up. I can’t vouch for the scalability of the designs, but it’s worth a shot, right?
