The Research For Kids Funiture Design With Growing Prosperity

This research paper is mainly focused on3-12years old children as targeted research object, to explore how could one set of furnitures could accompany them through infancy to youth, in order to extend the furnitures' functional life.This paper analysed and summarized the growth and the condition of compatibility from both physical and psychological perspectives. The variation characteristic during the physiological development process is that the physiological scale varies greatly, their muscles and bones has not completely developed, and this is the first growth peak during the whole development process. The mainly variation factor of the living room's basic content is transferring from rest, play and entertainment into rest, reading and study; and according to the types of activities and the areas for those activities, space allocation in children's room could be divided into lounge area, study area, games and entertainment area and storage area. Take children's mental development as a starting point, more analyses on children's different phases' behaviour characteristics, their spatial perception, play tendencies, creativity, self-awareness, color perceptions and so on. The conditions during different stages during3-12years old could be divided into pre-operation period (2-6,7years old) and concrete operational stage (6,7-11,12years old):during the pre-operation period, children would need the help from the outward appearance to think, and not be able to have operate thing, which contains certain rigidity; during the concrete operational stage, children would have a more systematic logical thinking skill which includes reversibility and conservation. Their spatial perception characteristics would start to transfer into three dimensional thinking gradually, their main form of thinking would transfer from specific images into abstract logic. The characteristics of playing tendency could be divided into symbolic play stage (2-7years old) and inerratic game stage (7-12years old):symbolic games are mainly about role-playing games while inerratic games are more competitive with certain rules. In those stages, children's creativity, imagination would develop rapidly. Children's strong self suppressive feeling begins to transfer into the ability of self control gradually. On the color perception side, the color range of children's attention becomes wider, and they start to favour secondary color more and more. After argued the three general elements of the 'grow-able' children furnitures which including function, structure, and decoration, and then brought out the idea of function expansion design that adapted to the growth and development while children grow older and more mature. And this design would include combinative design and deconstructive design; the fold-able structure with the locatiing pins provide the possibility for the adjustable dimensions and sizes, the adjustable angle installation made the furniture an angle mediation device with educational and interesting changes, and this could be achieved by modular design and produce technology. And the color change could be carried out by the standardized design; soft decorations could help changing the shape and colors of the grow-able furnitures. This study also discussed the design elements of the grow-able children's furniture from children's physiological and psychological changes. Scale and angle adjustment should be considered when designing children's desks, chairs, and bedding furnitures; storage furnitures such as wardrobe, bookcase and other containing furnitures'inner space need to be adjust flexibly. The man-machine size for the grow-able children's furniture should be able to change according to the changes of children's height and weight, it should also follow the '32mm system'. Color and shape should be designed to satisfy children's psychological needs:simple shapes would meet the requirements of the grow-able children's furnitures design. The grow-able furnitures' color could coordinate with similar colors, or contrasting colors, or adjusted colors. The light color of wood and the soft wood texture would make children feel happy and relaxed. Finally, it could be summed up to certain rules and methods to design the 'grow-able' children's furniture, based on the general principle and the safety principle, ecological principle and the comfortable principle, more design factors should be considered which would including scalability, transferability, composability, and convertibility four aspects. And all these rules, principles and methods should be used in practice in order to design a set of 'grow-able' children's furniture.A number of interdisciplinary methods were used during the process of the research for children's furniture. There are children psychology, developmental psychology, ergonomics, a combination of literature, comparative method, deduction, induction and other related theories and research methods. And with the market research, there are also some specific case studies.