BEST OF SHOW WINNER: Mamma rocking chair

Best of Show Product Winner

The Mamma rocking chair is a tribute by industrial designer Patrick Messier to Sophie Fournier, his life and business partner, for the birth of their first child. When she announced that she was pregnant, she said that she would need a rocking chair. After the couple shopped in vain for a product that met their criteria for aesthetics and comfort, Messier decided to create something new.

Made from a single piece of injected fibreglass with a high-gloss urethane finish, the chair evokes a ribbon suspended in space, not to mention Verner Panton’s fluid, futuristic 1968 chair for Vitra. However, Mamma’s comfortable shape was actually derived from a grid based on the Fibonacci series, a sequence in which each term is the sum of its two predecessors (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), as found in nature (petals in a sunflower, spirals in a pinecone) and as a clue in The Da Vinci Code.

Levitt: This feels like a continuous ribbon. It’s very beautiful. It’s so direct and unfussy.

Sorensen: No, it won’t tip because the fin widens near the bottom.