For a Better Social Experience: Furniture Designed as a Medium for New Social Dialogue Between Shy and Outgoing People

Description

Shyness, as a personality trait as opposed to outgoing, is also an emotionally common phenomenon
that can be seen as a series of avoidance behaviours in social situations, such as less eye contact,
blushing and sweating, trembling voice, and being silent due to nervousness. However, due to
historical and cultural reasons, people with open personalities are more likely to be recognised and
respected by society, whereas shyness is often labeled as negative, timid, and avoidant. Moreover,
social interaction at this stage is based on a simple perception-interaction sequence, where people
quickly guess the characteristics of another person based on a one-sided first impression (behaviour,
look, appearance, etc.) when they meet for the first time, and then override the perceived impression
to other qualities of the same person. At the same time, under the influence of prevailing "social
perceptions", shy people's introverted behaviour can be misinterpreted as rude and self-centred,
leading to the marginalization of shy groups in social environments as unfriendly, resulting in an
unequal social status and experience.
This study aims to explore a new form of dialogue in social interaction that can enhance the two-way
social experience by influencing the perception and understanding of shy people by outgoing people.
Unlike the traditional dialogue model of verbal communication between people, the ideal new
dialogue is more about exploring the possibility of multi-interactive mechanisms of objects as a
medium of communication to help others understand shy people better and to explore the potential of
human, object and behaviour (shyness) relationships. In order to achieve this goal, the project will
extract representative furniture and small objects from social scenes and deconstruct them
morphologically, to discover the embodiment of "shy interaction" through the formation of a series
of objects that do not conform to the "habit". At the same time, colour, texture, and other factors are
also taken into account in the process of perceiving shyness, so that outgoing people can shift the
object of their perceived shyness from people to objects, breaking the social cycle and gradually
establishing new modes of dialogue.

Period	1 Feb 2023 → 31 Dec 2023
Examinee	Pengjia Chen
Examination held at	Department of Industrial Design
Degree of Recognition	Local