Yes please! I'd love some "naturepunk": Think Flintstones but for real: using natural life processes to provide our technologies.
Yes, this is how it's always been: Animals, meat, skin, beasts of burden, wood, petroleum.
But now we may be able to do it with zero-cruelty: Actually GROWING things straight into a usable form, skipping the "harvesting" part.
(Though I hope we're not opening a whole new realm of misery.. imagine being born as a chair and feeling ass all your existence)
There's an interactive story that has elements of this[0]. Many of the simpler objects don't have much capacity to think or feel on their own, but the corru equivalent of elevators are fully sentient beings capable of conversation and problem solving, and they're just kind of built to be quite satisfied helping move people around. Corru computers are capable of hosting entire communities of distinct intelligences, each program sentient and (mostly) dedicated to its role. Not all of them can be chatted up, the authorization/access control program understandably isn't very chatty, but it is an intelligent being.
It's a pretty enjoyable experience, and all of the graphics are ordinary HTML elements with 3D CSS transformations, which makes it super hackable and fun to crack open in an inspector.
All that to say, if the best chairs required intelligence, it'd be in everyone's best interest to make that intelligence real thrilled about ass.
[0] http://corru.observer/
In one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books there was a bit about the company that makes Marvin, the depressed robot, also making sentient elevators. These elevators had issues with getting depression, and the companies using them in their office buildings would hire psychology students to talk to them on the basement levels and convince them to go up again.
But not too thrilled, mind you
one word: chairdogs