Firmament: Furniture for Imaginative Play

Firmament is an outdoor furniture piece designed to bring play into adults’ everyday lives, providing a unique space for a single individual or small group to imagine, daydream, and meditate. Firmament’s nostalgic form, referring back to childhood treehouses, acts as a entry point for adults to embrace play as they once had. Its height adds an element of privacy, and provides users with a new viewpoint for seeing their environment. A mirrored floor, fabric walls, and transparent roof work together to augment interaction with the world, particularly the sky, and provide numerous opportunities for play. Wood, metal hardware, mirror, plexiglass, fabric.

Designed and fabricated in 4 weeks, in collaboration with designers Chloe Yun Wang and Yeon Soo Kim.

Process

Early in the design process, we used sketches to explore how large furniture structures could facilitate different postures and interactions with the sky.

We researched relevant furniture, public and private installations, and artworks to inform our design.

Creating scale and full-scale models helped us develop our design, as well as test how users would experience the furniture.

After gaining insights from sketch models and user tests, we went on to simplify, refine, and fabricate our design. We fabricated all components in the wood shop and fully assembled it on-site.