We've seen people using the latest AI image generators to imagine all sorts of weird, wonderful and sometimes just plain terrible things. Mainly for putting animals or exotic fruit in clothes. But AI-generated fruit aren't only for making memes. They're also for sitting on.
An architect wanted to know ‘what happens when fruit becomes furniture?’ I'd normally have told him that it quickly gets squashed. But it turns out, it can actually inspire some glorious designs. IKEA, I hope you're reading this, but until we get the fruit-inspired chair of our dreams, see our guide to the best Herman Miller chairs and the best office chairs for backpain for furniture you can buy now.
The Architect, professor and screen print maker Frank Jacobus has imagined a series of bright, bold fruit-inspired chairs using the text-to-image AI art generator Midjourney, which is normally more known for producing apocalyptic fantasy scenes (and in one case even winning a fine art exhibition). He used various fruit in his text prompts including kiwis, dragon fruit, grapes, papaya, melons and more.
The results are stunningly surreal. Jacobus encourages people to ‘imagine if these chairs had a subtle aroma you were sitting within.’ We're not sure we want that, but some of the concepts look like they might actually be extremely comfy to sit in.
The concepts are going down a storm on Instagram. "I'm obsessed. When are you going to make them," one person wrote. "So many, many great designs. I want a room full of them." I have to agree. They look like they could even have good ergonomics. As Jacobus comments, "They’re all ripe fruit, so just the right amount of squishiness."
It's another project that highlights one of the better potential uses of AI generators – testing out novel ideas. Jacobus told Design Boom, "they already allow designers to quickly produce anything they are imagining at the moment and to get immediate feedback with rich imagery". Midjourney can only create 2D images for now, but if AI software starts to tackle 3D design, furniture could get very interesting. To learn more about how such tools work, see our feature on how to use DALL-E 2.
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