Design Inside the Box 2011: Subsonic Chair by John Greg Ball

John Greg Ball

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Subsonic Chair was named The People's Choice Award winner in an event held February 24 at Boconcept. Read More

John Greg Ball had one goal in mind when he designed the Subsonic Chair: he wanted it to be the loudest thing he had ever lounged in.

“I wanted to sit in it and feel like I was on a rocket,” says Ball, who works as an instructor of mechanical design technology at SAIT Polytechnic, and as a designer with the John Greg Ball Industrial Design Studio.

The Subsonic Chair hooks up to any iPod, MP3 player or gaming system to play music or experience the full range of sound effects from your favourite video game, as two 16-inch subwoofers at the bottom of the chair unleash a flurry of bone-thumping bass.

Ball came up with the idea for the chair a few years ago, when he entered a competition to design a piece of furniture for teenagers on the popular design website, designboom.com. “When I started thinking about things teenagers do, two things came to mind: listening to music loudly and video games,” he says.

The Subsonic Chair placed in the top 10 out of 3,500 international entries in the designboom.com competition, yet it existed only as a rendering for two years, as other design projects kept getting in the way of its construction. It wasn’t until the students in Ball’s design class at SAIT pressed him last year to build it that he finally decided to bring his bombastic chair to life.

“I’ve had it in a lot of books and magazines as a rendering, and every time I showed it when I did lectures on my work, I always got a really good response. People would say, ‘Wow, have you built that yet?’” Ball says. “The amount of people asking that finally got me to build it.”

Visit BoConcept (701 11 Ave. S.W.) before February 24 to see the pieces in person and to vote for your favourite design for the People’s Choice Award