Social Furniture

Last week I took part in a workshop centered around ideas of social furniture.  The aim was as follows:
To design a social furniture that creates a sense of community around it, not just physically but
mentally through a process of creation.

There was a very interesting set of participants including product designers, stylists and artists. 

 This piece started out with a bunch of us wearing one sleeve of a shirt, with our other sleeve tied to another participants empty sleeve.  It ended up being a large ping pong bat, with an orange being bounced from shirt to shirt.

This was an experiment in tension and coordination.  A piece of blue plastic canvas was pegged around 4 participants and created a series of pockets for containing and carrying goods.  It also provided a surprising amount of strength - the participants found they could all lean back simultaneously and it would hold their weights.

For lunch we ate and talked in a Food Communication Lab hosted by Natasha Rosling.

The afternoon ended up with a discussion of ideas that had come from the mornings experiments, some of which are documented below.