The Duo Project

As a reaction to our current fast living and increasingly individualistic society, the focus on presence and need for human interaction is rising. With inspiration from Marina Abramovic’s performance work “The artist is present” at MoMa in New York, this project was centered on how to create a setting which enhances the interaction between two people.

During this project, the aspect of interaction turned into verbal communication and the idea of creating two chairs and one table. These objects were treated as a scene for conversation and placed in a coffee house context. The context was chosen to be able to divide the room into different distances. Entering the coffee house means being in a more or less public place, while sitting down the need for a secluded space is crucial to be comfortable to talk. This movement that is dependent on furniture’s relationship in space, has been very important for this project.

Since interaction is dependent on attention, this became the main theme. Research on how to capture and keep attention, together with investigations on how people are behaving in a coffee house context, led to valuable insights about how design can affect behaviour. This was translated into shape, proportions and material, with a goal to first make the setting noticed and relevant, to later be transformed into a scene for conversation, to keep the attention between the two people using them.