Body Conscious Design, Hsin-Hsien Chiu, Featured in Taiwanese Design Magazine La Vie

Body Conscious Design, Hsin-Hsien Chiu, Featured in Taiwanese Design Magazine La Vie

Hsin-Hsien Chiu, Ph.D. candidate in Architecture with a Designated Emphasis in New Media

Hsin-Hsien's work on Body Conscious Design was recently featured in Taiwanese design magazine, La Vie.

Body Conscious Design (BCD) provides us with a new way to conceive of human-environmental interactions, rethinking the body-mind relationship and proprioception (Cranz 2000). Whereas the field of ergonomics focuses on the relationship between people and machines, it tends to treat people as machines with interchangeable parts (Bennett 1977). However, in BCD, the human body is thought of as close to a tensegrity structure (Fuller 1965)—a dynamic structure in a well-balanced combination of tension and compression. Thus, the human body works best in multiple postures—postural pluralism (Cranz 2000). Hsin-Hsien Chiu applies the principles of BCD in different scales, including the design of shoes, chairs, and elements of an outdoor public plaza, three different examples that explore new possibilities for human- environmental interrelationships.

You can view a case study of four design projects in several scales featured in La Vie here.
English translation can be found at the following link.

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Above: Taiwanese Broadcast Report (News98, Taipei) on Body Conscious Design, with UC Berkeley professor of Architecture Galen Cranz, founder of BCD, and Hsin-Hsien Chiu.