Symbolic System Of Furniture Design

The study of symbology has been widely applied to many fields, and it is becoming a popular and important research subject in art study. However mostly, aesthetic symbology is only used in pure artistic subjects like fine arts, music, etc. Recently, it has started to appear in architecture and artistic design. Nevertheless, little research has been done in this area domestically, and it is still a blank in applying symbology research to furniture design.China manufactures and consumes a great amount of furniture. Furniture not only is closely tied to ordinary life, but also affects the domestic income of a country. Furniture is a form of art, but it holds usage value as an industrial product. That's where furniture distinct itself from other forms of art. The study of furniture will positively and deeply affect China's furniture industry. So the research of the symbolic significance of furniture and then the establishment of independent furniture symbolic system are of great academic value and realistic importance for the theory and practice of modern furniture design.Furniture design constructs an important portion of art design, and shares a lot of its design symbols with painting and architecture. But the unique rule of shaping symbol in furniture design needs to be noticed. They both construct the picture utilizing the combination of dots, lines, surfaces, volumes and the arrangement of white, black, grey and colors, to express the particular social background, aesthetic sentiment and characteristic style. All the dots, lines, etc. used above are aesthetic symbols. At the same time, furniture acts as an important role in modern life, which endows furniture social meaning beyond its functionality and external shape. With the study of the furniture shaping symbol, we can summarize the culture background and the spirit connotation behind the external representation. It also can reflect the relationship between the representation and content of furniture design, and provide modern furniture design with shaping and culture basis.Any complete symbolic system possesses the characteristic of language structure and meaning. This paper tries to establish a framework of symbolic system of furniture design and it emphasizes on investigating the rules and the constructing of such symbolic system. This paper also explains the characteristics of language structure and meaning in furniture design symbols. Finally furniture design examples are used to demonstrate furniture's cultural and professional information with symbolic design.The goal of this paper is to extract the meaning and implication of the symbolic system of furniture design, therefore construct an initial but complete system. Research methods used here include collecting and sorting data/information and case study.