Casepieces present an interesting program in that of all furniture typologies, they are one of the only that consistently change in form and language depending on what they have been designed to hold. Historically, it is thought that hollowed out tree stumps were some of the first known case pieces. Scale and size of the casepiece has changed throughout history depending on which elements of material culture were marked for safekeeping. In the archives, one finds a variety of scale– from cabinets that span the size of an entire room (cabinet of curiosities) to one that holds minutiae (seed cabinet). There is a poetic symbiosis between that which holds and that which is held. A casepiece essentially has a portion of usable space that is concealed and can be opened. The size of the usable space is variable and not necessarily prioritized over the size of the frame that encompasses the object. The overarching rule is that there is necessarily an inside/outside and a way to access it.
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Beginning with the casepiece, I investigated the sense of touch and the gesture of opening. The means of interaction were distilled to: pull-to-open and overturn. These cases pieces serve to focus attention on the base interaction itself. Each explores these specific gestures, almost a portrait that isolates a highly specified way of experiencing the storage system. Using gesture and interaction, the design of these pieces pushes the user to toggle with physicality without knowing what will happen, for example- size of effect, how big is the inside of the piece? These pieces have no handles, buttons or pulls and through avoiding semantic design they allow a pause to be programmed at the level of immediate understanding. One might wonder if they are lock boxes, maquettes, stationary sculptures and therefore they function to disrupt typical use by making user interaction more important than communicating “usable” containment.
The program extended to engaging with accessing a system of containment in a way that abstracts the case piece itself. No longer about functional storage, these pieces are about user interaction and experience of a familiar furniture program. Scale, seams, symmetry, uniform material and clean finish were used as elements to draw attention away from functionality and towards the experience of discovering the opening.