The CSH Stay At Home Design Quiz

Spending more time at home, we’ve been trying to find different things to do to break up the monotony of time. It can be a real struggle to differentiate between day and night, the work day and the weekend. Instead of watching yet another Netflix series, last weekend we decided to make each other a little quiz – I devised a series of questions about football for my husband Olivier and he came up with some design questions for me. It got us thinking and helped us have a little giggle, so I thought I would build on his questions and create a design quiz for the blog! (ditching the football questions, sorry!)

So let me introduce you to The CSH Stay At Home Design Quiz. I’ve come up with 12 simple questions to test your design knowledge from home.

How well do you know your favourite designers? What does IKEA stand for and who designed the first office chair?

Some questions are fairly easy, others are a little bit more difficult. I wanted to make it accessible to everyone, whether you know your Saarinen from your Aalto, or your Panton chair from your Swan chair.

Good luck. And remember no Googling!

QUESTIONS

1. What does IKEA stand for?

2. Who said ‘Good design is as little as possible’?

3. How much did Nike first pay for its famous logo?

4. Can you name one chair by Verner Panton that isn’t the Panton chair?

5. When was the Milan Furniture Fair first launched?

6. What was the age difference between Charles and Ray Eames, and who was older? (Bonus point if you can guess the years they were born)

7. Who designed the first office chair?

8. Which design was put into production first, the Eames Lounge chair by Charles and Ray Eames, the Bertoia diamond chair by Harry Bertoia or The Swan chair by Arne Jacobsen?

9. Which one out of these five architects was the only one to have formal architectural training? Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller. 

10. What is the most expensive chair ever sold at auction?

11. Which famous Finnish architect was put on the 50 Finnish mark bank note?

12. What is the name LEGO derived from?

If you don’t want to scroll down and see the answers STOP NOW. I’ve made downloadable PDFs with The CSH Stay at Home Design Quiz and the quiz answers so that you can print them off and complete the quiz at your own leisure at home.

ANSWERS

1. The name of the popular Swedish furniture store is formed from the founder’s name, Ingvar Kamprad (I.K.), the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd (E), and Kamprad’s hometown of Agunnaryd (A)

2. Dieter Rams

3. $35. Nike’s iconic logo was designed by student Carolyn Davidson in 1971. She was paid $35 but was later given 500 shares in September 1983 (estimated to be worth $1,000,000 as of 2015)

4. Possible answers: Cone chair, Peacock chair, Pantanova chair

5. The Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano was first launched in 1961 with a focus on Italian furniture

6. Charles Eames was five years older than Ray Eames. Charles Eames was born on 17 June 1907 and Ray Eames was born on 15 December 1912

7. Charles Darwin. In the 1840s, he put wheels on the chair in his study so he could move around and see specimens more easily 

8. Bertoia side chair (1953), Eames Lounge chair (1956), followed by the Swan chair by Arne Jacobsen (1958)

9. Walter Gropius. Gropius studied architecture in Munich and Berlin in 1908. Mies van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier were all self-taught and started their architectural careers as apprentices, lacking formal architectural training. Buckminster Fuller was expelled from Harvard University twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe and then for his ‘irresponsibility and lack of interest’

10. In 2009, Eileen Gray’s dragon chair was sold at Christie’s Yves Saint Laurent Le Bergé auction in Paris for €19,500,000 ($28 million)

11. Alvar Aalto was featured on the 50 Finnish mark bank note in 1986. The note featured the architect’s face on one side and the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki on the other side. The notes were withdrawn from circulation in 2002

12. The LEGO group was founded by Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1932. The name comes from the Danish word leg godt, meaning ‘play well’. Christiansen took the first two letters of each word to make LEGO

And that’s it! There’s no prize… it’s just something fun to do at home to help pass the time – a little design distraction from me to you.

You can always download The CSH Stay at Home Design Quiz and the quiz answers and complete it at any time. I’ll also be sharing it on Instagram stories. If it’s popular I’ll do another one soon!