Four Seasons Bench Bed

by Cathy Wong

by Cathy Wong

When developing the idea I aimed to provide a comfortable enviroment for to the homeless people and couples, that I would see that parks in general have the potential to facilitate the basic need of lying down, staying relax while in reality the experience is ruined by the benches with barriers in the middle.

As I am designing the cushions as the material to fill up the gaps the barrie created, I wanted to make it as suggestive as possible, that they can lie down, and because there are already picto- grams used in park, I first tried with the above designs trying to provoke users to follow the pose so they can see the tree views on top. And I later used mainly autumn color as I think that as autumn and winter approaching I would prefer to make it more fit into the environment, the variety using two sides of the cushions may add the playful element as suggested by one of my instructor, and later when we further have peer critique after a visit to two hotels, while suggested to further develop the patterns, I
then come up with a term “four seasons”, then I think make much sense to the park as a place to experience different seasons as it bring people closer to the nature, that for sure is the name of a hotel.

Then after a few experiment with the materials, I decided to as well offer the variety of softness and hardness of cushions in different sides of them, while one side of spring and summer is the harder foam and another side is stuffed with sponge on the surface, which is again inspired by the different softness pillows provided in one of the hotel visited, and through having a darker side of pattern in the autumn/winter side it provide a subtle different in temperature after a prolonged period of exposure to the environment.