Furniture Urbanism: A Pedagogy for Fabrication and Social Engagement

Abstract

Furniture Urbanism is a fabrication-oriented design studio conducted to provide our students with an experience of engaging the realities of full-scale fabrication and the complexities of designing objects for public urban spaces. Co-conceived and co-led by an architecture professor and a fine-furniture maker who manages the university maker spaces, this course highlighted their varying yet complimentary pedigrees of furniture, fabrication, and material insights. Furniture Urbanism is a hypothesis that is related to urban furniture, the human-scaled urban objects and infrastructures that populate the public realm. It also draws from Everyday Urbanism, the activation of common and unconsidered urban spaces with periodic events and opportunistic uses (Crawford 2008). It also has affiliations with Tactical Urbanism, low-cost, high-impact urban interventions to transform public behavior and use of city spaces (Lydon and Garcia 2015). Furniture Urbanism is meant to stimulate social interaction by engaging people not only with the designed object but also with the other urbanites who are drawn to it. The studio was composed of two phases: Furniture and Urbanism. In the Furniture phase, each student produces a finished furniture object, building skills alongside an awareness of furniture from a creator and user standpoint. This immediately engaged students in improvisational thinking and a ‘designing-through-making’ process. Prototyping early and often supported student improvisation while increasing their confidence in navigating the undiscovered. In the Urbanism phase, students formed design teams to conduct a collaborative process of merging the individual designs into purposeful propositions. The final Furniture Urbanism objects were then deployed as finished prototypes across our urban campus. Through this sequence of individual and collective projects, the students learned to balance what craftsman and author David Pye describes as the “workmanship of risk” that is dependent on individual dexterity and the “workmanship of certainty” that is rooted in systems of production (Pye, 1995).