In today’s fast-changing world, the pressure and frustration that people are under are becoming greater and greater. More people find themselves not able to relax even in their homes, thus people’s life quality and work efficiency are significantly reduced. This project is intended to improve people’s mental experiences at home or workplaces by redesigning or inventing a new type of storage furniture or instrument for organizing housewares. My investigation and research show that some of the reasons that people find frustrating about a living space are: disorganization of objects, the repetitive work that is required to organize objects or a combination of both. At the same time, the book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi revealed that people can have the best kind of mental state (called the Flow) not by resting and doing nothing, nor by working extremely hard, but the best mental state of flow can be reached by doing tasks that are neither too hard nor too easy, as well as having shorter time spend before one can see the result of that task. Ikea’s customer furniture building concept can be a good reference, but the consumer will only participate in the action of construction once in the product’s lifespan—right after they bought it. While building a larger piece of furniture can also be too difficult and exhausting for the consumer.

 

Inspired by these materials above, I decided to make a kind of shelf that has a large degree of customizability, while also require some amount of consideration, planning, maybe even experiments conducted by the consumer before it can function properly. At the same time, the designed shelf should not become static even after the consumer has figured out a plan in the beginning. Instead, it should evolve or change continuously throughout its product lifespan, and require a new shape or form depending on the change of storing objects’ property or amount. In such a way, the product will be able to encourage consumers to have a mental state of “flow” continuously. The product should also have a relatively active and interesting physical appearance, so the image itself can encourage the consumer to actively participate in constructing and organizing the product.