People Like to Sit Where There are Places for Them to Sit

As public space designers and design facilitators, how might we make sitting in public areas more attractive and delightful?

The Challenge

Seats and benches are an ubiquitous and essential amenity for public spaces. However they tend to be generic and uninspiring. Could participatory design break the monotony of boringness?

The Outcome

Through partners and collaborating organisations, onebite has co-designed a number of public seating “structures” that challenged the form and look of conventional seats and benches, injecting new functions and playfulness into public areas.

Looking for a Place to Sit?

TingTing is onebite’s contribution to 2017’s City Dress Up : Seats ‧ Together, presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and organised by the Art Promotion Office.

“People like to sit where there are places for them to sit”. Urban researcher William H. Whyte stated emphatically in his seminal study of outdoor public spaces, “This may not strike you as an intellectual bombshell…but sitting space is most certainly a prerequisite. The most attractive fountains, the most striking designs, cannot induce people to come and sit if there is no place to sit.”

This oft quoted insight came from Whyte’s popular book “Social Life of Small Urban Space”, the result of Whyte’s two-year long research, The Street Life Project. Launched in 1971, the research sought to understand the human usage and patterns of New York City’s urban spaces such as plazas and parks. Using time-lapse photographs, interviews, and first-hand observations, Whyte realised a public place is enlivened by the opportunities to sit and mingle. The more varied and flexible “sittable spaces” available, the more popular the public space is. Equally, onebite is inspired by Whyte’s commonsensical yet often overlooked observation that seating should be designed to encourage people to sit, and not meant as a spectacle or simply to fulfil a design guideline, the latter Whyte referred to as “architectural punctuation”.

Given the paucity of sittable space in a land-scarce city, how did onebite work with collaborators and partnering companies to integrate good design with comfortable seating?

Listening to the Community

Aiming to encourage interaction and dialogues between park users, TingTing is a set of six sound sculptures and seating installations that utilised the idea of a sound mirror to create an invisible connection between the seats to enhance interaction among users.

One of onebite’s earliest efforts to re-conceptualise the function of public furniture came by way of our participation in the Art Promotion Office’s "City Dress Up - Seats Together" public art project in 2017. Assigned to a site on the Happy Valley Recreation Ground frequented by young families and sports goers, onebite’s design wanted to let users sit and enjoy the sports grounds’ ambience and atmospheric sounds which would otherwise go unnoticed in our daily lives.

Titled Ting Ting, a transliteration of its Chinese name 《聽．亭》, the name referred to the seat’s cocoon-like shape that resembles a protective shelter as the Chinese character 亭 suggested. It also helped users to listen, or 聽, in Chinese. The parabolic shape of the seat collected sound waves and concentrated them to a focal point corresponding to sitting height. When placed in alignment with another seat, it creates a sound corridor where a person whispering into the focal point of one dish could be clearly heard from someone else listening at the focal point of the other. The three pairs of seats sparked meaningful interactions between friends, family, and lovers.

The project was also an opportunity to listen and understand the community’s views. Through a participatory design process, onebite sought out park goers’ opinions on suitable colours and materials for the seats, realising a surprising “fact'' along the way that green surfaces tend to attract mosquitos and therefore public furniture in shades of green are not popular!

Responding to the City

Thousands of trees, were toppled by Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018. To utilise and recycle the enormous amount of fallen trees, the Art Promotion Office launched Junk! Woodworking to raise awareness and appreciation for the fallen logs.

onebite’s designs are oftentime our personal response to societal happenings and environmental issues.

In September 2018, thousands of old and valuable trees were toppled by Typhoon Mangkhut. With the aim to utilise and recycle the enormous amount of fallen trees, onebite joined hands with the Art Promotion Office and Hong Kong Sculpture to launch Junk! Woodworking, a four-part event aimed at raising awareness and appreciation for fallen logs.

One of the events was the Adopt a Log School Project which invited local primary and secondary schools to adopt fallen logs to explore woodwork skills with their teachers. Onebite designed a colourful yet lightweight structure to hold the log in place during the air-drying process. Shaped like a timber bench yet holding an actual log, the device subverted our normal impression of public seats to arouse awareness for environmental issues and spark conversations on coexisting with nature and sustainable resource management.

Another project was commissioned by Hong Kong Design Centre in 2021, during the height of Hong Kong’s Covid-19 pandemic. onebite chose to embrace safe distancing restrictions rather than reject or ignore them. Titled “#APARTOGETHER” or #一齊一個人 in Chinese, our art installations at Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter were part of that year’s Design District Hong Kong (#ddHK), an annual month-long festival that championed district-based creative placemaking projects. Responding to the curatorial direction “transFORM”, onebite designed a series of umbrella-topped public furniture inspired by Chinese garden pavilions. Each pavilion allowed users to hang out ‘together’ while keeping them ‘apart’ safely, hence the coupled-word title. Two users could counter-intuitively share an alone moment sitting together or enjoy a solo ride on a merry-go-round and see-saw that required them to rotate and balance the machine together.

Bringing Art to Public Space

The “On Your Seat, On Your Mind" Art Project” is commissioned by Hong Kong Museum of Art, with onebite on board as Project Collaborator. It involves four artists specialising in different media, including Ray Chan, Margaret Chu, Hung Fai and Ou Dawei, and onebite creating five sets of artistic seating for the Museum through a series of public engagement programmes.

The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) occupies a prominent spot on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. Despite its accessibility, fine art could come across as foreign, unfamiliar, and too high-brow for a large segment of Hong Kong residents. Hence, many regulars of the waterfront promenade have never entered the museum. Bringing the museum’s artworks to the public space as functional seats helps the public to break down misconceptions about art and help deepen appreciation.

The “On Your Seat, On Your Mind” Art Project was launched in conjunction with the completion of HKMoA’s revamp in 2019. The museum’s new facade served as inspiration for a set of five distinctive benches displayed in various locations around the museum. onebite worked with masters of different art mediums, namely Ray Chan (ceramics), Margaret Chu (sculpture), Hung Fai (Ink Painting) and Ou Dawei (calligraphy) to incorporate their artworks into their benches’ design, resulting in a fruitful co-design process.

More recently in 2022, HKMoA commissioned Sarah Mui, onebite’s Design Director to contribute an artwork for its 60th anniversary exhibition, “In Between”. Reflecting on the intertwined relationship between art and architecture, Sarah created a fluid, ribbon-like installation titled “in-between déjà vu”, which figuratively wove in and out of the museum through the glass panes of the ground floor exhibition hall. Decked in attractive hues of blue, yellow, and green, the sittable structure invites visitors to take the first step towards art appreciation by offering an unobstructed view into the museum.

In Chapter 11 of “Social Life of Small Urban Space”, Whyte introduced the term “triangulation”, in which he described how an object or event could provide a stimulus to forge social bonds between two strangers. What if public seats are no longer commonplace and mono-functional? onebite hopes good design will facilitate social interaction even through the simple action of sitting. How might we incorporate interesting games with a bench design; or perhaps we could make public seats so exceptional, they become natural conversation starters?