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Chairs proliferate the portfolios of designers from all over the world. The chairs we selected, however, are more artistic expression than practical seating solution. Not comfortable and not intended for seating, they celebrate nonsense and can even make you giggle.

Arm by Clark Bardsley Design, a practice based in Auckland, New Zealand, is not another chair. According to the designer, it is an anti-chair. Developed as an exploration of the constraints of wood bending, a process that is closely associated with the history of chair design, Arm is an outline of an archetypal chair produced in fine American Oak.

Arm fits over any everyday seat – from a plastic patio chair to an office chair, from a tree stub to a garbage bag, thus creating a completely new chair every time, cloaked in the signified history and value of the bent oak form.

Oak for the project is cut into strips, steamed and glue laminated into curved forms, that are later machined into rounds, and finished with a brush back sander. After that, the parts are joined using rail bolts, and the legs are carefully cut in and glued in place.

Uncomfortable Chairs by Seattle-based industrial designer Jack Marple are conceived to make life more difficult and frustrating. The three chairs are endowed distinct personalities, each of which is intended to hurt the user’s feelings.

“Dumped” is a chair that lets one relive the feeling of being dumped. It seems to give you support, but before you know it, you will be sitting on the ground, not knowing what has happened or how you can fix it.

“Tipped” helps you remember that you can’t keep it together all the time. You may try your best to balance, tipping over is inevitable the second you take your mind off the task.

“Stabbed” brings to mind all the times you may have been stabbed in the back. The chair looks inviting – but when you plop yourself down, it really hurts.

Unlike the other two, A Chair On Which To Sit by Russian designer Ilyas Chozhobekov of architecture practice MPTNS can finally be sat on. Still, a clever optical illusion makes it look like a spiky medieval torture device, which is not inviting at all.

The structure of the chair is made from birch plywood clad with HDF sheets. The black spiked integrated into the seat are in fact pyramids made of MDF. However, the seat is topped with clear epoxy resin and covered with a matte varnish, making the sharpness of the spikes visible to onlookers.