DISSERTATION

POPULAR DESIGN FROM THE SEA OR WHY FUN IS FUNCTIONAL

Our day to day environments are much too serious and functional.
The Modernists created a very sensible but totally rational design philosophy
which hardly includes any emotional or entertaining element.

This was because they saw the human being as something completely rational.

During my research I found out that users produce much better results
when the interfaces or objects they interact with are fun to use or have an entertaining element,
even if the item fulfills very functional purposes.

Fun should definitely be an important element of FUNctional design.

But what actually is fun? What do we find entertaining?

Although some seaside places are rundown nowadays because many people can afford a holiday abroad,
still nearly 6 million people a year visit the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool.

As Blackpool and its theme parks and piers were from the beginning places, purely conceptualised for fun and entertainment purposes,
I thought this would be the right place for my research.

So I booked a bus ticket and went to Blackpool.

I came back to London with hundreds of photos, bags full of souvenirs and a lot of intense impressions.

I realised through my own experiences on the British seaside as well as literature review that these surroundings,

where people go to spend pleasurable times are full of symbolism, stories, emotions, heroes and visions.

These environments have attracted human beings since hundreds of years and still do so.

There is indeed a strong desire and need for non-rational and symbolic elements and even objects with functional purposes should be designed considering fun aspects when a human being will interact with it.

Furthermore I drew the conclusion that if we produce more harmonious results when dealing with entertaining objects, we ourselves will feel more harmonious when our environments would be entertaining, too.

In my dissertation, I proposed some ideas to make urban spaces more entertaining.

Be it a waiting area in an airport, our way to work, an elevator in an office building.

I took the fun elements from the seaside and integrated them into our daily life to make it more amusing.

And I proposed ways of making Recycling as pleasurable as playing at the game stalls on a fun fair.