Blu Dot’s Field Trip project for NYCxDESIGN unexpectedly reminded me of The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse’s magical 1956 short about a balloon drifting through Paris with a mind of its own. In these photographs, Blu Dot’s Field Lounge Chair begins to behave similarly — less like furniture than a strangely sentient companion wandering through Minneapolis in the dead of winter.
Blu Dot Field Lounge Chair
Photographed by Minneapolis-based documentary photographer Galen Fletcher, the chair appears in diners, caves, music venues, and snowy urban corners throughout the Twin Cities. The effect is oddly charming. The chair starts feeling like an introverted Midwesterner politely revisiting familiar haunts after years away.
What makes Field Trip work is that it avoids the exhausting self-mythologizing that dominates so much of contemporary design branding. Most furniture companies no longer sell chairs; they sell moral superiority through upholstery, or the fantasy that owning the correct sofa will transform you into a calmer and more aesthetically evolved person who owns ceramics and uses phrases like “intentional living.”
Blu Dot, thankfully, still seems aware that a chair is supposed to be sat in.
The Field Lounge Chair, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, was designed around an almost suspiciously modest premise: comfort without visual laziness. A chair to read, converse, nap, or “do nothing in without looking lazy,” as the company describes it. Honestly, that line alone says more about modern design anxiety than most design criticism.
Presented at Blu Dot’s NoMad store during NYCxDESIGN, Field Trip sends the chair back into the environment that shaped both it and its creators: Minneapolis. And unlike so many lifestyle campaigns today, the city never feels flattened into generic “creative-class” branding content where every coffee shop on Earth suddenly looks identical.
Riverview Theater
You can actually sense Minneapolis here.
Blu Dot’s accompanying essay spends a surprising amount of time discussing the city itself — the Mississippi River, the flour-milling history, the Walker Art Center, and even The Replacements. In lesser hands, this could have turned into unbearable corporate storytelling. Instead, it accidentally reveals something more interesting: Minneapolis genuinely shaped the company’s worldview.
The founders — John Christakos, Charlie Lazor, and Maurice Blanks — describe arriving there in the 1990s and discovering a city that treated design less as status performance and more as part of everyday life.
(L-R): John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, Charlie Lazor (Photo credit: Madison Voelkel/BFA.com)
That ethos quietly runs through the entire project.
The Field Chair itself reflects it too. Stylish without screaming for validation. Comfortable without looking like orthopedic equipment. Cool without trying to become an Instagram personality. Like much of the best Midwestern culture, it seems faintly embarrassed by overt self-promotion.
The exhibition’s strongest idea is placing the chair outside pristine interiors. Once removed from luxury-apartment fantasy worlds, the object changes. Sitting inside a cave or an aging music venue, the chair suddenly acquires personality. Fletcher himself described it almost like an old friend revisiting familiar places after a reunion. Strangely enough, that anthropomorphizing works.
Lake of the Isles Skyline
