Throughout the fall semester of 2025 at RISD, my colleague Chelsea Liu and I spent our time with our beloved professor Hammett Nurosi studying the appearance of typographic forms in ordinary pieces of furniture. We started off the semester with studying furniture design, and after familiarizing ourselves with sketching and modeling skills, we started to feel dissatisfied with how limited we were to just furniture. Typography was not limited to something we see on paper and signs, but also in existing objects; even if the designer did not intend for them to look like letters. This chess set is dedicated to Hammett Nurosi’s expert guidance to our study: the existence of typography in everyday objects.

The final product of the Collaborative Study Project was a chessboard with individually designed game pieces made by laser cutting layers of walnut wood.