(un)happy table.The story of the happy table that got me in trouble.
Accidentally happy furniture: (UN)HAPPY TABLE began as a quick experiment in large-scale 3D printing. Through a chain of coincidences, a spontaneously designed table became a smiling character and eventually produced almost everything except happiness.
The Smiley Table That
Produced No Smiles
The design itself happened quickly and somewhat randomly. I loosely modelled a small table and, instead of giving it the expected four legs, decided to use three. There was no character, face or larger concept behind it. Only after seeing the finished object from another angle did I realize that the three supports had accidentally formed two eyes and a large smiling mouth. As a former fanatic of characters and comic books, I was delightet to find the table had somehow become a sort of character.
Another coincidence was the material. The filament available happened to be an extremely bright red PLA, giving the object an exaggerated visual presence that reminded me of the colorful postmodern architecture and furniture of the 1980s and 90s, particularly the playful excess, asymmetry and humor of Italian anti-design and Memphis. As a perfect example of going with the flow and letting the material dictate the next steps, what began as a technical printing test was unexpectedly starting to develop its own personality.
Ironically came an important incident. In the excitement of testing the machine at furniture scale on my own, I had overlooked one fairly important question: whether I could actually use around 3.5 kg of material for myself.
Apparently, I couldn't... or not at least without asking.
Type: Experimental furniture / additive manufacturing
Design: Marcelo Guajardo Dávila
Status: Produced
Materials: Red PLA, approx. 3.5 kg
Method: 8 mm nozzle large-scale FDM 3D printing with BigRep ONE
Dimensions: 700 × 500 × 500 mm
Produced in: Espoo, Finland
Year: 2025
Photography: Marcelo Guajardo Dávila with help of Mattia Anderle and Aleksi Virkkala
That contradiction transformed the project again. The Happy Table became the (UN)HAPPY TABLE, and I began treating its accidental history as an almost comical irony. Funnily so, this actually made me very fond of it. The table was taken to my apartment, had been used everyday beside our couch for eating, sitting and storing decorations. Has seen happiness, tears, drunkness, sauce has been spilled on it, and I almost even lost it in the sea while recording a video of it drowning. Then, the narrative got transformed into a photographical series, I placed the character in contradictory and absurd situations: drowning face-down in dark water, but also appearing around places that genuinely make me happy, the sea, sauna, Helsinki Metro, Hesburger and Pikku Huopalahti, whose colorful postmodern architecture resonated completely with the object itself.
The photographic series became another space for experimentation, mixing fashion imagery, early-2000s aesthetics, music and playful visual references to build a world around the happy table that originally had brought no smiles and its strange personality.
What began as a technical exercise became a project shaped almost entirely by coincidence, improvisation and unintended consequences: an arbitrary third leg became a smile, an available filament became an aesthetic direction, a material experiment became workplace trouble, and that trouble became the narrative of the project. It became a reminder that going with the flow can itself be a way of designing, allowing unexpected situations to redirect the process and lead us toward things we might never have imagined or intentionally designed.
The (UN)HAPPY TABLE was never really planned. It happened.
Pikku huopalahti post-modernist series: When design is “hard to read”, for whom does it become legible?
Helsinki Metro Series: Fitting in is a state of perception
Otaniemi series: Dramatic plastic on nature
Play first, Make sense of it later.