When I was researching ideas for playful geometric furniture, I discovered the brilliant ScottSass and the Memphis Group.

I was really draw to the bold and playful use of color and simple geometric shape in their design. The Flamingo table showed me how you can use simple shapes and colors to create sculptural object that are also functional. Therefore, I decided to play with some shapes and colors and tried to come up with interesting configurations of my own. The use of slits to connect different parts have created a very clean and slick look.

I had my personal tutorial with Kyung Hwa. We talked about how my project have evolved over the last few weeks and she asked a lot of questions that I have never asked myself before.

She brought up the question about how to maintain the integrity of the structure while it is installed outdoors in a public space. Homeless people might start occupy it, if that happens then other people can’t use it. People might leave it everywhere and it will be scatted around big open space. In a museum or gallery setting, the staff working in there can help you maintain it. But when it is out in the public space, it will be hard to maintain. What are you going to do about that?

To be honest, maintaining the integrity of the structure is not my primary focus. It was meant to be played with. Whatever form or shape it was left of at the end of the day is a statement by itself. However, to help keeping it together for the entire duration of the installation, I would pick the site that has some sort of commonly acknowledged physical boundary that helps to contain it within that boundary. Also, shortening the duration of the installation(like a week instead of a month) in each location can also help prevent abusive use of structure for long period of time in order to to help preserve the best condition of the structure. Switching locations after a week, keep it a nomadic installation might help preventing homeless people from inhabiting the structure and the space.

She also raised a question about when and where it will be installed and who will be using it? I need to be more specific about those because the choice of material, dimensions, colours depending on those factors. I think in the summer months of London will be great for this project when there are more sunny days. Since it will be outdoors, the material needs to be durable and weather resistant. At the moment, I want to use sturdy, scratch-resistant foam and are lightweight and easy to use. This material is used primarily to make yoga blocks. There are companies make the foam from recycled foam. I was also thinking about cork. Since they are also light weight and porous so water can evaporate from it if they get wet.

She also told me that public art is about accessibility, maybe look into which community does not have art? If you want to engage a grater audience, you should also think about who do you want to involve in this project. People who already have access to art in their community or people who does not have that? Public art should be used effectively as a great tool to rejuvenate communities. The structure itself does not energize the space, it is the social activities it activates that energize the space. Our social activities are dominated by the physical structure in the space, can we switch that role and let people construct the space and structure that serve their need for social activity in the public space?

Once I started looking into interactive sculptures and playful structures. Iygia Clark’s name came up.

She discovered ways for participants to interact with her artwork. The idea of co-creating the sculpture with the audience by allowing them to manipulate the artwork and leave their own creative expression on the artwork is really interesting. It fundamentally changed the relationship/dynamic between the artist and the audience. One of her primary goals as an artist was to appeal to the average, everyday person, not just the bourgeois crowd. As an artist, she merely created a beautiful object for the audience to interact with and express the complexity of their own emotions and response through their interaction with the object. Her earlier work was influenced by the constructivism movement which rejects the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. 

It raise a question for myself about how do I want my art to be consumed by my audience as an artist. Specifically, in the realm of public sculpture. Do I want to make a giant bronze sculpture and put it in the middle of the plaza and let it become a monument of some sort or a tourist attraction? Or I want my work to serve a purpose in the space or for people within it? Most public sculpture we see in the public space are fixed metal or stone structures that are artistic and purely decorative. Some interactive public installations are more like people interact with the structure not interact with other people.

As a result of all my thinking, I decided to start an experimental project. I want to create a group of enlarged furniture looking structure that are interactive in the public space. They look like giant puzzle blocks and the audience can reconfigure them to make chairs, lovers seat, sectional sofa, table, slides etc.

By providing configurable facilities in the public space, it give the control to the audience and how the structure looks and functions completely depends on how they want to construct a space for social interaction or isolation in the public space. But also provide a physical structure to facilitate any form of social activity. I realised that most of our social activities are shaped by the physical structures that exits in the public space. Can interactive public sculpture change that dynamic between social activity and physical structure in public space?

I was kind stuck in my experimentations with deployable structures and could not come up with more creative or artistic designs. Also I just don’t know if they will work structurally. So I decided to take a step back and just think about structures that are transformable. I immediately thought about modular structures because of the versatility they have in reconfiguration. In terms of shapes for the modules, I decided geometric shapes are the best to simplify the process of reconfiguration as they are very easy to play with and you can’t really go wrong with it. With all that in mind, my first reactions are-Memphis Designs. I laser cut some MDF dics of simple geometric shapes and created slits in some of them so I can assemble them to create prototype. I had so much fun with them. The options are limitless!! I was so surprised how many configurations that I came up with in just 20 minutes.

I also referenced the use of color in Memphis design, mostly, vibrant primary colors with some black and white polkadots or stripes to break up the solid color blocks.I

As I was playing with my prototype, I kept thinking about what is the relationship between human and object, whether it is functional or decorative, in domestic space or public space? How does a public structure change/enhance /impact human behavior in the public space? How will my audience engage with this adult playground I want to create? If I can create so many structures in 20 minutes, think about how many other configuration people can create?

I want my audience to create their own seating/resting/playing area with the blocks I provided. Let it be a bench, a bed, a sofa, a conference space, a playground, a slide, a rocking horse… The sculpture is co-created by my users and the outcome is unpredictable. I want the users to be able to engage with the structure with their own need and creativity.

I love to write in my journal when I am traveling. I love wondering around the city then write about my observations and emotional responses of my experience in a new city. I did not realized I was doing creative writing. To me, I was just writing in my dairy.

Writing as part of art making is a new concept for me. Even though I know that as an artist, we ought to be able to write/describe our work very well. However, I have always viewed writing as a separate form of art that has nothing to do with object making. My previous practice was making/production focused. In production, you lose the mental engagement in the process sometimes, it is so repetitive it became purely physical. But art making requires constant mental engagement, whether that engagement has a visual representation in the work or not. Every thoughts you ever had contribute to the final work in some way. Whatever you make, an image, object or a piece of writing, they are all byproducts of the constant thinking.

I carried my foldable stool with me to Trafalgar Square today. I found a busker and stood there for a good 20 minutes before even have the courage to take out my chair. I was extremely self-conscious the entire time. I kept reaching to my bag but hesitated to take out my stool and throw it in the middle of the crowd. Doing some sort of experiment in the public is totally out of my comfort zone.

After 20 minutes of struggling, I pulled the stool out of my bag and placed in the circle that the audience had formed in front of the busker. I waited for a while and no one took the seat. I sat on it for a while then left thinking people now have seen what I did, maybe they will sit on it as well. Still, no one took the seat. I was really embarrassed so I asked a couple next to me why they don’t want to sit down for the performance. They told me that because they are tourists, they have somewhere else to be, they don’t want to stop and sit down.

I suddenly realized that sitting down has a psychological implication of stopping. Trafalgar Square is a place full of tourists, people are in transit constantly. They might not want feel like they are stopping. Most of them prefer standing because it does not mean stopping for them psychologically. They can leave at anytime and continue their adventure.

Busking and tourism have a very close relationship. Buskers love to perform at popular tourist spots because more foot traffic means more income. Busking became part of the tourist experience because of that. The temporary relationship formed between the busker and the audience are pretty disposable because of the nomadic nature of busking and the constant fresh flow of tourists at those tourist spot. Could my structure help change that dynamic and make people stay longer? Who are more likely to sit down and enjoy the music? Because those are the people who are more likely to stop and interact with the structure.

I went to the Design Museum to see the show from Yuri Suzuki. The interactive sound installations was very interesting. He made a group of colorful furniture that has huge amplifier on it. When you speak into it, you will hear a manipulated version of your words playing back.

I noticed that primary colors are used to express playfulness of the furniture. It is easy to be noticed. It grabs your attention then invites you to play.

I had a great conversation with Clare today. She helped me trace my thought process from the initial inspiration to where I am right now. My process was directed by a series questions that I asked myself while I was navigating through the city of London.

What made me stop in the city was the first question that I asked myself when I was exploring the tube line with my partner. I noticed that I was drawn to street buskers all the time and stopped to watch their performance. That questions led to a product design idea to create an expandable bench for the buskers to help them engage more audience. Then I asked myself what does this object do when there are no buskers around? Is it a design product that I am making or a sculpture? Then I just realized that I want to make a structure in the public space that can be decorative when no one is around, playful when people interact with it and functional when it needs to provide a particular function. The original idea for the buskers became one of the functions of the structure. The idea transformed from a product made for a specific group of people to create a structure that stimulate certain experience and performance for the public. The structure is fixed but buskers are nomadic and audience are in transit. How does the constant flow of people interact with a fixed structure is something I need to find out.

I noticed the sound of the music brought people together and that created a very focused energy within the crowd. People are focused on the performance. When the performance is over, that focused energy became disbursed. Like cutting off a very tight string. Suddenly, everything is very loose. I want to create a physical structure that help invite/promote/enhance that focused energy in the public space. When it is not used for performance, it is a physical structure that stimulate child-like experience with objects that invite and encourage play and touch.

When the space is transformed into a performing stage by reconfiguring the structures, it creates an enclosed circle, just like the circle people naturally formed around the buskers. It created this temporary space that contains a very focused energy in the middle of the city. That energy sucks you in and block you from the outside world for a brief moment. Buskers are like magnets, their music creates a magnetic filed in the space where they perform and the attraction between them and the audience has very intense energy, and that energy disappear once the performance is over. The structure has the flexibility to restore the openness in public and release that tension and temporary disruption.

My next research focus is going to be playful, interactive structures that are deployable/transformable. More configurations produce more dynamic stimulations through interaction. How can I make my structures to produce more configuration? That is what I am gonna explore…

I experimented with one of the structure I had in mind. Therefore, I laser cut the shape and built a mock up model in order to play with different configurations. I did not count in the thickness of the material when I made the illustrator file, so the pieces did not fit perfectly. But I still managed to glue them together so I had something to play with.

I spent some time to research and experiment with more deployable structures using origami paper. Surprisingly, most of the resources I found regrading to deployable structures were by architects. Deployable structures have many applications. I am very interested in it because I want to create something that has great configurability in a public space. Something that is transformable but also structurally strong enough to hold the weight.