BEIRUT: Arlette is earthy and a little austere. Raymonde is soft and sleepy. Odile is all rock’n’roll. Constance is curvy. Yves and Yvette are most certainly lovers. Margot? A mother. Amandine? A swinger. Spiridon will make you laugh. Geoffroy will remind you of school. Yvonne simply scares you, being so hard and cold.

Who are these characters? Not people, but a collection of some two-dozen rocking chairs, all named with a nod to old-fashioned, French Mandate-era monikers.

Karim Chaya may be best known as one-half of the industrial design firm ACID, which he founded 15 years ago with the architect Raed Abillama. As ACID has grown into a business with 160 employees, Chaya has maintained a more low-key design firm on the side.

Established in 2001, Spockdesign is named not for the pointy-eared first officer of the USS Enterprise (“Star Trek” fans will get the reference), nor for the American pediatrician who published a series of child-rearing books last century, but rather for Chaya’s dog, an Australian shepherd who died in 2009.

Spockdesign is Chaya’s think tank, workshop and playground. He’s been neglecting it for a long time, but a prompt by the board members of the Beirut Art Center got him to give it the attention it needed to generate the delightful new exhibition titled “Beirut Rock Center.”

Without any idea what he would produce, Chaya promised to do the show years ago. The upstairs space at the BAC is the young institution’s weakness. There’s a café, but it hasn’t taken off. There’s a library, but it’s too small for serious research. When the BAC first opened, a design boutique filled out the floor, but it more or less failed as a business.

After that, the BAC’s board came up with a fortuitous solution – turning the space into a second exhibition gallery to highlight the daring, artisanal end of the local design scene. Chaya was an obvious choice to play with the possibilities of high design in the context of contemporary art.

“When they asked me to do a show, a lot of things went through my mind,” says Chaya. “Either it was going to be a lot of gut-reaction design or I was going to do a series of lanterns. I thought about rocking chairs, but I was really afraid, because chairs are the most difficult things to design. Normally, if someone asked me to design a chair, I’d say six months. Here, I designed 30 chairs in three weeks. It was kind of nuts, but it was all in there. It was like a volcano exploding.”

“Beirut Rock Center” is an ode to both the restful grandfather – deep in thought, rocking peacefully back and forth in front of a fireplace – and the fidgety kid at school forever tipping his chair back to balance on its rear legs.

The permutations are many – rocking horses, swings, cradles, an old Mercedes-Benz car seat suspended from metal rods like a pod in a crash-test lab, and two enormous wooden Mediterranean Cable spirals, turned on their sides on the terrace to become rockers in their own right.

“I use my design guts in ACID,” says Chaya, “but ACID is heavy and big and cumbersome and Spockdesign is just me doing whatever I feel like doing. With the BAC, I’ve been postponing forever. Work and work and responsibilities and work kept pushing me around.

“Then they said, ‘Enough. Do.’ I ended up with a month to do all this. It was an opportunity to give myself [a] deadline. It made me realize how much I have in my gut. It made me realize I should give this more time. I enjoy it. It’s the first time I’ve enjoyed design work in a long while, as a creative process rather than problem-solving.”

The rocking chair idea didn’t come from nowhere. The starting point was a piece Chaya made 20 years ago at the Rhode Island School of Design. The one unique piece in the exhibition that’s not for sale is an aluminum riff on Gerrit Rietveld’s zigzag chair called “Boing.” Not a rocker per se, it flexes just enough to achieve the effect of, yes, tilting your chair back in school.

“This is really my chair,” says Chaya. “If I had to choose one chair to sit in for the rest of my life, it would be this one. I like the coldness that warms up, and the movement is perfect.”

What makes “Beirut Rock Center” a hybrid of sorts is the ease with which Chaya’s work lends itself to layers of interpretation, memory and emotional response. It is solid as a design show, but it is fascinating as a rumination on movement, sound and ritual, with a subversive little installation, titled “Rock Your Faith,” tucked into the back corner, where several major religions are made to wobble.

With pieces in metal, leather, stone and wood representing the work of close to 40 different artisans, the show is, moreover, an important reminder of how much can be done in a place not particularly known for its manufacturing prowess.

“I’m more interested in the possibilities than the shortcomings,” says Chaya of doing design in Lebanon. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This country is like a laboratory, and you have to learn to take advantage of the fact that you are in a lab rather than an advanced chain-driven factory.

“There are definitely a lot of possibilities here, and a lot of advantages. Turnaround time on prototyping and testing is nothing. It’s instantaneous compared to what I would be able to do in other, developed countries.

“Whatever we lack in technology and up-to-date materials and techniques I think we make up for in ingenuity and sometimes deviousness, because we can.

“People sometimes ask, ‘How would you compare Lebanese design to European design?’ And I say, ‘There is no Lebanese design or European design.’ There’s just a bunch of individuals no matter where they are. Obviously you have your cultural baggage, but it’s such a sponge, this place, you just have to know when to squeeze.”

Karim Chaya’s “Beirut Rock Center” is on view at the Beirut Art Center through Jan. 21. For more information, please call 01-397-018 or visit www.beirutartcenter.org