Printing Modulare Furniture

[furniturer]

Hello everybody,

I am working on a somewhat big gift for my godchild (to be honest, I also have fun working on it).

I want to create a set of simple components that can be combined to easily construct a chair, a table, a shelf and possibly many other kinds of furniture.
Thinking back to my childhood playing with lego I began to wonder a while ago why the furniture I have cannot be dissambled an recombined to form other objects. For example if I have a table and want to replace it whith a shelf: why can't I use the parts from the table to easily build a shelf?

I had a look at basic furniture and recognized that on an abstract level it is composed of only three elements: plates, rods and joints between them. So I came up with the idea to try to create basic furniture based on these elements that can be disassembled and recombined to build other objects.


The resulting furniture may not reach the functionality and aestethics of some design furniture but I think it could be great for a child to play around with it and create its own furniture or other objects.

I have several construction goals:
- Use as few types of basic components as possible
- Make it easy to assemble and dissamble the components
- Construct the basic components in a way that they can be combined as freely as possible
- Design everything in a way that it can be assembled and dissasembled without any tools
- Construct everything in a way that it can withstand some (not yet exactly defined) load (e.g. a child or even adult should be able to sit on a chair without it breaking down)

I already started to construct some basic elements and combine them to different kinds of furniture (see the attached images).


In my current design I use dovetail joints to join the plates with each other and with the rods. I don't know yet how to join the rods with each other (I used holes in the rods to symbolyze the areas where they can be joined).


Currently I have 5 different elements: a plate with dovetail joint, 2 types of rods with dovetail joints, one rod withouth dovetail joint and a cube without dovetail joint.


As I do not have much experience in construction and 3D printing I wanted to ask if somebody has some ideas how to improve my concept?


Every idea is welcome (basic elements, joints, materials, design, production method etc.)!


I am happy about every (constructive) reply!