Raising awareness of seating furniture design in landscape architecture education: physical, activity-use and meaning dimensions

The aim of an urban space design is creating successful open spaces that can provide a high level of pleasure and contribute to urban life by meeting human needs and expectations. Successful open spaces are closely related to existence of seating furniture discussed in multiple dimensions and designed in order to provide affordances for various occupation and activity types. Therefore, in this study a design approach for teaching landscape architecture students, who are future urban designers, how to design seating equipment’s in order to create successful open spaces was developed. With this design approach, acquiring students the ability of designing useful, functional, aesthetic and creative seating furniture was also aimed. The design approach that was aimed to introduced to students adopts that seating furniture design is not a single dimensional process and consists three different dimensions such as physical, activity-occupation and meaning. It is assumed that for students thinking about these dimensions contributes to both producing more realistic-practical, functional-useful, creative-aesthetic and solution centered designs, and creating successful spaces that are used frequently and support social interaction on a higher level. The study that was conducted in order to support these assumptions consists of two phases. The first phase includes students evaluations of the course that was carried out with the awareness of being multi-dimensional, and experts evaluations of the designs produced with this awareness. By both experts’ and students’ evaluations, it was revealed that the design process carried out with multi-dimensional thinking awareness contributes significantly to students’ designing functional-useful, realistic-practical and creative products. In the second phase the users of the urban space had evaluated the simulations that was composed by seating furniture designed by the students. As a result of conducted analyses it was determined that there is a congruence between evaluations of experts and users. The seating furniture designed with dealing physical, activity-use and meaning dimensions all together had affected the preference, using frequency and period significantly in other words had a fundamental effect on creating successful urban open spaces. The findings of this research reveals the importance of multi-dimensional thinking in designing seating furniture in terms of its contributions to both design education and urban life.