A Study on Residential Behavior and Furniture Design

Many furniture designers believe that, their designs can decide and change user behavior, and also that they can create new lifestyles. Designers, when designing furniture, imagine the residents' need, simply on the basis of personal experiences and feelings imposing them on the residents' experience. This kind of design, especially, of domestic furniture, goes far away from the actual needs of the inhabitants'. Considering this current situation, this article reports on a research that employed the method of Ethnomethodology to investigate the residential behavior in housing living context. Furthermore, using the theory of environmental behavior and psychology studies, the analysis will search for a deeper meaning of residential needs, and try to offer a new method for household furniture design catering the real needs of residents. The study observed 57 middle-class families living in urban housing environment, including 44 families in Beijing and 13 families in Helsinki. This article tries to understand the current living status and household furniture use, particularly inside the block flat environment in Chinese unban context through the method of participant observation, interviews, video-recoding and questionnaires. Ultimately, this article also proposes a design implementation and method in order improve the current living conditions. The research interests in 1) how the furniture-environment entangled with the body of human being which beyond a ergonomic dimension 2) the sensory and performance on the inhabitants' requests for the furniture, 3) and people’s adaptability to furniture. The intensified living is an inevitable trend in future, so with a micro view of residence modality, the "moderate living" has more realistic meanings and feasibility.