I Want You to Want Me
Furniture Designed to be Loved, 2023
I Want You to Want Me is a collection of furniture designed to be loved. By designing furniture to be loved, we can reduce furniture waste, as people don’t throw away the things they care about.
By encouraging routine care, anthropomorphizing the furniture, and embodying lived experiences, I Want You to Want Me forms deep connections with people through design.
Through in depth research, I created methods to deepen user relationships with their furniture: unglued joints encourage routine care by loosening with use, a reactive finish anthropomorphizes the furniture by reacting to body heat, and replacement parts embody lived experiences by creating unique amalgamations of components over time.
Images taken from interviews I conducted. I talked with people about the objects that are special to them and what made them so.
Quick sketches and doodles I made to help figure out how to apply the design elements I chose for this project and to begin developing a visual style.
A collection of CAD models showing different ideas and iterations of the table and stools over the course of the project.
A selection of prototypes I made for this project, including exploration of surface finish, joints, scale models, and iterative prototypes.