Industrial Design

A personalised wheelchair seat – prototyping new avenues for mass customisability through single-line 3D printing

Developed in partnership with the ETH-based startup Versive, this project investigated mass-customisable approaches to designing and producing seating and backrest solutions for its wheelchair platform.

Versive is an ETH-based startup developing the next generation of manual wheelchairs with its innovative “steer-by-leaning” technology. Building a wheelchair from scratch, rather than adapting existing models, opens up space to rethink long standing industry conventions around design, fitting, and adjustment.

Wheelchairs are highly customised to their users. Different body types and disabilities require unique seating and backrest shapes. Dimensions such as width, length, height, and angles are tailored to each individual. Traditional high-volume fabrication methods (e.g., frames and wheels) are now being combined with advanced additive manufacturing technologies.

Guided by close collaboration between Versive and the Industrial Design Lab at ZHdK, the project advances two key strands: first, a parametric design framework for seating components that enables precise adaptation to each user’s ergonomic and clinical needs; second, a streamlined single-line manufacturing strategy that makes such high levels of personalisation feasible at scale. Together, these strands lay the groundwork for a fully digital pipeline capable of delivering highly personalised wheelchair components with significantly reduced lead times.

The applied method, known as “single-line” printing (also referred to as Vase Mode or Spiralise Contour), originated in hobbyist contexts but has been systematically developed by Roman Jurt over the past decade into a robust design and fabrication strategy. The wheelchair seat and backrest mark a significant milestone in this evolution: a highly personalised, large-scale, and structurally demanding part with stringent requirements for stability, interconnectivity, and surface quality—printed in under 7 hours, previously considered unfeasible by industry experts.

A complex freeform shape, fully parametric to user data and incorporating geometric details down to extruder-line precision, has been prototyped and printed using several different materials and 3D printers.