Social Objects – an exploration of adaptability in furniture design; from object to spatial proposition

The Masters reflected upon a series of furniture design projects that were undertaken over a five year period. The aim of the project was to uncover how my role as a designer of furniture, and the role of objects that I design, can adapt and change with the nature of the project at hand. The projects that make up the central research of the Masters varied in scale, intention and relationship to the audience/end user. The furniture produced, ranged from gallery based sculptural works that were designed to provoke the audience, to the design of ’systems for living’ intended for diverse (and displaced) multicultural user groups.

The project positioned itself as a consideration of the creative methodologies that lie within contemporary furniture design and a repositioning of the role of the designer in relation to the user of the designed object. In this context the modernist functionalistic notion of ‘form follows function’ was seen as being a mechanistic response to the concept of design and one that does not incorporate the complexity of the human mind. Within the research framework of the project the perception of function in furniture was considered as being relative to culture, socio-economic situation, bodily interaction and time.