Rhubarb Seating: Designing for the Senses

Design is an activity of the senses and the emotions.  The appeal of a design is an immensely individual response – how each of us responds to a particular aesthetic is ultimately a personal thing, regardless of our ability to evaluate it rationally.  However, there are some general design principles, aside from pure aesthetics, which have been an increasing preoccupation for designers and which are informing the nature of many of the requests being received by manufacturers.

It has long been understood that colour both affects and reflects mood, that texture, feel and touch are powerful determinants of whether we feel at ease or on edge.  But it feels recently as if we traditional design tropes in a variety of settings are being completely overturned by a new level of appreciation of psychological and emotional responses to every element of design, both visual and tactile.   This awareness of the importance of the sensory elements is not limited to environments concerned with special needs of one sort or another but is extending into everyday commercial spaces as well as to classrooms and hospitals.

For Rhubarb Seating, this has brought involvement in a number of initiatives that have called for a different approach to environments which historically have had a very predictable look and feel.  Probably the best recent examples of this are projects delivered by Rhubarb in a children’s hospital and in a school.

Great Ormond Street has blazed many trails but one of them is certainly in the creation of spaces where a conscious effort has been made to ensure they feel less like a hospital and more like a home. Rhubarb worked with a children’s hospital that wanted to emulate this approach.  Colour, shape, texture, comfort all played their part in transforming a very traditional hospital environment into a space where sick children and their parents would feel more “at home” and therefore more at ease.  Gone are the rigid rows of beam seating and harsh colours, replaced by comfortable upholstered seats, fluid lines and curves and calm colour palettes which have transformed the whole feel of all the spaces. 

Schools have been another prime example of a set of outdated assumptions about what appeals to children and Rhubarb had puzzled for many years over the fact that so little attention seemed to be paid to children’s comfort in the classroom. The rigid chairs, hard edges and bright colours didn’t add up to settings likely to make them feel at ease nor did they seem conducive to creating the best learning environments.  And that is without bringing into consideration the purely physiological effect on posture and strength of poor seating.

Much of the reason stems from the budgetary constraints under which schools and hospitals operate, which inevitably have a substantial impact on purchasing decisions; but there is now a growing shift in emphasis as the challenges and impact of the mental stresses experienced particularly by young people become more of a concern.  This is bringing new approaches to the overall design of classrooms with more muted colours and increased use of soft and upholstered seating to give a more homely feel. This does not need to break budgets but it is going to require a raft of design input to create new furniture which satisfies the necessary standards of durability and stability required for such environments.

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