Korean designer Taekhan Yun dreams of filling the world with chairs of your dreams

Imagination always encompasses more than reality. After all, it is free of any physical constraints. Perhaps that becomes the biggest thrill for designers—seeing their dreams take shape in the real world. They are taught to understand materials and master craft techniques as tools to bring fantastical ideas to life. Paradoxically, however, learning to exercise creativity also introduces a new awareness of limitations—structural, material and technical. So how does one learn to imagine freely? Cambodia-based Korean designer Taekhan Yun may have found an answer in an unlikely collaborator: children.

In 2025, the furniture designer engaged students at the English School in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in a chair-making workshop called Chair for Kids. Why a chair? “It is a very familiar object that everyone uses, but at the same time, I think it can be a playful object that holds a person’s imagination and stories,” Yun tells STIR. The workshop started with the young students producing the chair of their imagination in the form of sketches. The resultant designs were undoubtedly out of the box because the ‘box’ has not yet been introduced. “Children do not place as many limitations on themselves when they begin designing,” Yun relays. “They simply draw what they want. A chair can become an animal, look like food or have a completely unusual structure.”

The aim of the workshop was not merely a translation of children’s drawings into actual chairs. Rather, Yun devised a workflow to allow the young participants to get involved in the making process themselves. After preparing their first draft, the children measured their own height and body dimensions to scale their designs accordingly. This was followed by the preparation of small prototypes in clay to help them understand the form in 3D. Yun then fabricated the resultant concepts in wood and presented them to the children, who coloured the chairs with crayons, similar to what they had done for their initial sketches. The chairs were then coated with a protective layer of lacquer spray and varnish.

Yun has been undertaking participatory design projects since the beginning of his career. Discussing his journey so far with STIR, he says, “I enjoy the process of working with different people and discovering new ideas and outcomes that I might never have thought of if I were working alone. Hailing from Seoul, Yun graduated as an object designer from ÉSAD Saint-Étienne in France, and has continued to practice since, between Seoul, France and Cambodia. His approach to design leans toward letting material, chance and play influence the outcome. Refined through workshops and processes, including Rebirth Project (2025) and What My Father Left (2025), the designer has furthered his approach across his recent projects, which include Offcut Chair with Kids, Birdhouse by Kids and, more recently, Chair Club.

Offcut Chair with Kids differs from Chair for Kids in one key aspect: the base material used Styrofoam offcuts from Yun’s This is Not a Chair project. The endeavour became much like a puzzle to be solved; a system that interprets design as a recycling process shaped through finite resources. The students were asked to try different arrangements using 30 irregularly shaped pieces of upcycled Styrofoam, testing them against a variety of functional and structural roles. The final stage featured three chair designs out of the 18 tested ones, with the most efficient use of the offcuts, coated with paper pulp and finished in enamel paint.

Birdhouse by Kids, on the other hand, introduced a different parameter: consideration of the other, a non-human inhabitant. The workshop started with learning sessions about bird species in Cambodia, including the structures and features of their habitats. The kids were then asked to unleash their imagination, and the resultant birdhouses—made in wood, cardboard and paper with a crayon-and-lacquer finish—were peppered across the school premises.

In Yun’s practice, the role of a designer goes beyond that of a creator to someone who facilitates, for others, to ‘realise’ their imagination. “The role of the designer emerges at the point where children’s imagination meets the practical conditions of making. I see my role as finding a way to connect the two,” he relays. Creating and maintaining these conditions, however, especially when considering facets like authorship, is often challenging. Addressing this, the Korean designer tells STIR, “In the making process, one of the most important things for me is not to redesign the children’s drawings. They are often structurally impossible to build, or difficult to reproduce exactly, but if I arbitrarily change the form, it eventually becomes my design rather than the child’s design.” Expanding on this impression of a designer beyond student projects, Yun has started the Chair Club: an open call for anyone—regardless of age, experience or location—to submit a chair drawing. Some selected ones will be crafted into reality by him.

What Yun values most, however, is not the workflows or the chairs he has produced; it is the understanding of how a child thinks of design. Having created a diverse, global archive of chair designs through the Chair Club, the designer encourages everyone to think as freely (and wildly) as children do.

 “I am not saying that children’s work is always better design. What I find important is their way of thinking. Before they learn the rules about what they ‘should not’ do, they imagine what they want first,” Yun adds. “I think adults in the design world can learn from children’s ability to imagine freely, not be afraid of making mistakes and not take familiar forms for granted.”