The Hundred-Year Chair · back matter

About the Designer

Karl T. Ulrich is the CIBC Endowed Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and researches innovation, entrepreneurship, and design. He holds bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. He is co-author of Product Design and Development, the standard textbook in the field, and author of Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society, a theoretical treatment of design as a general human activity.

The Hundred-Year Chair is where those two books meet a workbench. Ulrich co-founded MakerStock, a supplier of materials to makers, and the project began with a MakerStock question: what should become of the offcuts? It grew into the questions this site documents. Can a chair be designed honestly for a century? What does a thousand-year discipline teach a hundred-dollar object? And what does designing with an AI co-worker actually look like when the whole transcript is kept?

He has founded companies including Xootr and Belle-V Kitchen, holds 24 patents, and has spent a career moving between the theory of design and the making of actual objects. The chairs on this site are built in his own shop; the drawings, the notes, and the mistakes are published as they happen. More at ktulrich.com.

Biographical facts are matters of public record: the Wharton faculty listing for the endowed chair and teaching, MIT for the degrees, and the two named books in print. The patent count and the companies are the author's own statement. The portrait was taken in the author's shop, August 2026.

A chapter of The Hundred-Year Chair, drafted and refined in public. The same text lives in the book; the interactive tools and the fully-sourced technical notes live here. home · the book · the technical notes · hundredyearchair.com