Open Chair

International ideas competition to design a full-scale chair fabricable on standard home FDM 3D printers. Submissions close 6 November 2026. Total prizes: £1,000 plus certificates.

Essential Data

About the Competition

Open Chair addresses a gap between digital design tools and domestic fabrication capacity. While desktop FDM printers are now widespread, most furniture projects remain speculative renders rather than buildable objects. Creathlon Competitions, in partnership with Aibuild, frames this brief as a test of whether a functional, full-scale chair can emerge from the constraints of a standard home printer bed. The competition emphasises open-design principles: entries should be downloadable, reproducible, and assemblable by anyone with basic equipment.

What Is Required

Participants must design a structurally stable, full-scale chair divided into components that each fit within a typical FDM build volume of approximately 220 × 220 × 250 mm. Assembly should require minimal additional hardware — screws or zip ties are permitted, but the primary structure must rely on printed interlocking parts. The brief encourages clarity over complexity and logic over ornamentation. Proposals that cannot reasonably be fabricated may be filtered before jury review. No physical prototype is required, but the submission must demonstrate credible buildability.

Submission Materials

Important Dates

Note: The organiser’s timeline lists jury review as “09 Nov 2025” — this appears to be a typographical error; 2026 is the logical year. Dezeen reports the announcement as 12 January 2027, while Creathlon states 11 January 2027. Verify on the official page.

Registration Fees

Prizes

Jury

The panel carries moderate weight: two senior ZHA figures provide recognised industry credibility, though the overall composition leans heavily toward the organiser’s own professional network.

Intellectual Property

Selected entries may be published as free downloadable files for public reproduction, with the original author always credited. The FAQ explicitly states that no commercial use by the public is permitted for shared designs. Full rights details are governed by the competition’s Terms & Conditions — participants should review this document on creathlon.co.uk before submitting.

✦ ArchUp Competition Review

Open Chair occupies a productive niche: it is neither a speculative rendering exercise nor a purely technical engineering challenge, but a test of whether design intelligence can survive the constraints of a 220 mm printer bed. The brief’s insistence on functional stability, numbered parts, and assembly guides elevates it above most product design competitions that accept polished images without fabrication logic. The open-source reproducibility clause is genuinely interesting — it positions the winning chair as a shared civic object rather than a proprietary product. The fee structure is accessible, particularly the £5 early-bird rate for individuals. The primary limitation is the modest prize pool relative to the effort required to produce credible STL files and assembly documentation. For architects and makers exploring computational fabrication at a domestic scale, however, the brief offers a rare opportunity to produce work that could actually be built by strangers.

Final Thoughts

Open Chair is a global ideas competition by Creathlon Competitions and Aibuild challenging participants to design a full-scale, home-printable chair. Registration ranges from £5 to £35 depending on phase and team size, closing 22 October 2026. Submissions are due 6 November 2026 at 23:59 GMT. Register and submit at creathlon.co.uk.

Submission Deadline

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