The Playable Monobloc Chair: A Design of Function and Memory

In Dakar’s Médina, designer Cheikh Ndoye taps the backrest of a modified monobloc chair. A low, resonant hum fills the room. This plastic form, found from Lagos to Lahore, is now a musical instrument.

“They’re everywhere,” Ndoye says, gesturing to a stack of standard monobloc chairs. “We don’t even see them anymore. But they have stories—they’ve been to weddings, funerals, street debates.” His intervention, called Sonochair, critiques disposable culture while embedding memory into design.

The monobloc chair originated in the 1940s, with its injection-moulded form patented by Canadian designer D.C. Simpson in 1946. By the 1970s, advancements in plastic moulding technology made it cheap and globally ubiquitous. Today, the chair’s design is often dismissed as generic, a symbol of industrial efficiency. Rather than reject it, Ndoye transforms it. He installs contact microphones, strings, and resonant cavities into the chair, allowing it to produce tones when plucked, tapped, or bowed.

Such modifications echo the work of Kenyan multimedia artist Wangechi Mutu, who added narrative to functional objects in her 2010 series Suspended Playtime. Ndoye situates Sonochair within this lineage. “It’s about evoking a connection to what the object has witnessed,” he explains.

The tactile functionality of Sonochair invites interaction. Ndoye exhibited the first prototype in July 2023 at RAW Material Company, an art centre in Dakar. Visitors didn’t just observe—they played. “Musicians were improvising. Children tapped rhythms. One person even recorded an impromptu sound poem,” says curator Aissatou Diallo. The chair’s familiarity lowers barriers: “People are unafraid to touch it, to explore its potential.”

This reimagining opens a conversation about the emotional weight of everyday objects. Diallo connects the chair’s resonance to funerary traditions in Senegal, where chants and percussion create a sonic landscape of mourning. “A chair like this might have been at a wake. Now it sings,” she says. Ndoye cautions against overly prescriptive readings but acknowledges the layered resonances. “Sound holds grief differently than words,” he says. “I wanted that ambiguity.”

The design is deceptively simple. The original chair remains intact, with Ndoye adding no more than $15 (11,000 CFA) worth of materials per unit. He sources contact mics locally from a vendor in Sandaga Market and uses hand-carved wooden bridges made by artisans in Rufisque. Each Sonochair is unique in its tuning, determined by the shape of the added cavities and the tautness of the strings. This blend of material and sound reflects a broader ethos in contemporary African design: creating high-concept work with limited resources.

However, the Sonochair faces criticism. Some argue that transforming a functional object into art erases its utility. Ndoye disagrees: “It’s not erasure—it’s evolution. The original chair still exists. This is an extension.” A journalist once described Sonochair as “novelty design,” a dismissal Ndoye finds revealing. “Design is often framed narrowly by Western critics. They see functional versus artistic as opposites. Here, they’re always in dialogue,” he counters.

The commodification of the chair-as-instrument complicates its narrative. Although Ndoye resists mass production, one chair sold in September 2023 through a Paris gallery for €3,200 (~$3,400 USD). He redirects profits to local music education initiatives, attempting to tether the object to its origins. Still, the sale raises questions: Can an object critiquing disposability escape commodification?

For now, the Sonochair remains a singular object of interaction. Ndoye’s plans are modest: workshops in Ouagadougou, Bamako, and Accra to teach others how to create their own versions. “The idea isn’t to create a product,” he says. “It’s to create an experience.”

The chair’s transformation into an instrument of memory and sound redefines what design can achieve. Sonochair asks fundamental questions of its users: How do we value the objects around us? How do we listen to what they carry? As Ndoye states, “Design is not just about the new. It’s about the echoes of what already surrounds us.”