Design + Human Well Being (Part 1)

There are variety sensory we can experience through our human body such as touch, smell, taste, see and listen, and this also could help us promoting our mental and emotional well-being, improving quality of life and physical health. As for me, sound is most common that we can experience with our human sensor. It is also connects other human features too, such as watching TV or playing musical instruments, etc..

Also, sound could help us improve a lots of benefits with our health systems. It can help us reduced blood pressure, pain reduction, improve memory, decreased mood swings, decrease anxiety and depression also stress reduction. There are many sound healing method that had been created and still using in this era of time, it also sometimes combining musical instruments to make the sound that can heal people like singing bowl therapy.

So, I decided to design a space that student can relax their mental and at the same time improve their health with sound therapy. At first, in my mind, I think that the space should have four kinds of playing musical instruments which is wind instruments (blow), reed instruments (piano), percussion instruments (drum) and string instruments (guitar). So, I did researched about some case study like is there any similar space that had been created and I found two, which is Snoezelen Multi-Sensory Environments and Sound Playground at Chicago Children's Museum. Well, I was impressed with Snoezelen Multi-Sensory Environments one of its space which is a space that full with lava lamps and these lava lamps had involved our eyes and ears to see when listen. So, I got an idea of something like this that people could explore the sound through their eyes. While, for the sound playground, at first I really want to build a sound playground but normally playground is for children, and my target users are 18 years old above so it might not workable and I end up to separate it into installation arts.

With my lecturer's guide, he told me to find more installation arts example to help me find more inspirations for my design. So, I did find some and I changed a bit and added into my space design.

As for my concept, i used the elements of sounds which is wave and speed. Because I found that the sound have different forms of shapes and waves to represent its speed, like sometimes is zig-zag or sometimes is wavy. So, I drew a bit of sketches of it to help me find more inspiration for my design. At first, I only created a model based on what I look from the sound wave which is horizontal lines and different height but when I sketch out more a bit then I found out that the waves sometimes might crossed over within each other so I drew a simply one and I also build out a concept model.