This research has investigated a participatory design method for furniture designers to allow users to express their aspirations through place making or creation of meaningful office workspaces. During my empirical work, I discovered that there were problems in getting the office workers to explain their ideas through verbal explanations. They did not have the right techniques and tools to express their ideas. From there I started to use mock-ups as tools to communicate and engage with the respondents in my investigation. In my research, I had identified a promising participatory design approach, role-play with mock-ups. My method sought to build the techniques which previously used by Mitchell(1995)and Lemons et al. (2010). Firstly, I identified the importance of understanding the needs and aspirations of users with regards to office furniture. Then, using participatory design role-play with mock-ups, it had enabled all respondents and participants to reveal their current problems, needs and aspirations. They started to create useful design ideas and opportunities for designers in developing new workplace designs. From here on out, it became evident that this technique was useful, workable and quickly accessible for Malaysian designers in actual design practice or other similar developing countries. In relation to this, I developed a social interaction technique to inspire and enhance active participation. The mock-ups helped the respondents to overcome their ignorance in design. It had also helped the participants and respondents to overcome their low awareness of 'design language' and started to share their concerns. These were not always practical design ideas but they provided distinct information which would be very helpful in developing and identifying design concepts. Through exploring how mockups could be used as productive tools to explore users’ needs and aspirations, the outcome derived from this research, was aimed to develop and provide guidance in design research techniques. It was also intended to inspire designers in developing furniture that would create a meaningful office environment, reflecting users’ needs and aspirations by allowing personalisation and place-making to occur. Knowledge contribution in this research could be divided into three parts: 1)contribution for design practice (section 6.2.1); 2)contribution for design research (section 6.2.2) and contribution for design education (section 6.2.3). The study revealed, by using role-play with mock-ups directly with the users, allowed the designers to quickly become aware of arising issues without the need to do a potentially time-consuming, normative and tedious observational study. My approach had the characteristic of intervention which allowed participants to go beyond normal practices, environments and scenarios. This could be seen in my findings during role-play with non-experts (section 5.1) and design workshops 01 and 02 (section 5.2). This research approach is primarily leads to new understanding about practice and described as “practice-led” approach to research. This project had investigated, demonstrated and opened the possibility that these approaches could be turned into a practical participatory process toward design in furniture industry practise in Malaysia and created a potential to be further developed by other researchers as well as disseminated through education for future Malaysian designers.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many of the British government’s attempts to rebuild the social order and improve standards were experienced through design. This was true not only in the home and in the workplace, but also in the everyday civic environment of the street. Ensuring that objects as ubiquitous as lampposts, litterbins and parking meters adopted the visual language of modern design – while at the same time, remaining inconspicuous - was perceived as being vitally important by the authorities concerned. For it was through such objects that Britain’s new social and cultural agenda was given physical expression, and Good Design was deliberately introduced into people’s everyday lives. Yet for a category of object designed to be ignored, postwar street furniture prompted considerable debate. For some members of the public, the new designs were grotesque, and represented a defacement of the country and its landscape’s individual character. While for others, modern street furniture design was a means of civilizing Britain’s streets. The design of these objects also drew strong feelings from the groups involved with its improvement, including central and local government, the Council of Industrial Design and other state-advisory bodies, manufacturers, and civic groups. Sometimes this multi-layered group worked to improve the design of street furniture together, and sometimes in opposition. This thesis is concerned with the critical reception of street furniture design in postwar Britain, and the debate these objects prompted. It emerges out of an interest in the systems and structures underpinning design culture, and a belief that reading the banal built world expands our knowledge of how political power works. Rather than prioritise the designed objects themselves or the intentions of those responsible for producing them – such as the designers and manufacturers – the thesis will expand the debate to include the wide variety of contemporary viewpoints that were expressed, both in public and private, in response to the promotion, dissemination and design of modern street furniture. Extending the discussion beyond the official design narrative to other, equally important voices reflects a more accurate picture of the process through which street furniture was discussed, understood and even determined during this period. Using extensive primary material from archives, contemporary periodicals and newspapers, and interviews with street furniture designers practicing in the postwar period, the five chapters of this thesis address the different arguments employed by the multiplicity of voices active in the debate. While many of these arguments focused on dichotomies - between old and new, local and central, modern and traditional - the thesis contends that postwar dissent over street furniture was informed by wider debates about Good Design, design’s relationship to high and low culture, its social and moral responsibilities, and taste. The dominance of such themes throughout the thesis reflects the wider social context of the period, which witnessed considerable changes to the authority of its institutions and cultural hierarchy, as well as more timely debates about power, influence and class in the shaping of public life.

The primary aim of this thesis has been to describe the complex influences governing the production of fashionable furniture in C18th England and France in order to reassess the connection between material practices, the cultures in which they reside and the philosophical ideas from which they emerge. This has been achieved by detailing the factors influencing the design and production of late C18th furniture in England and France and developing a comparative model developed around the Harewood Library Table by Thomas Chippendale and The Wallace Collection F302 Secrétaire á abattant by Riesener, in order to isolate, identify and interpret differences between them. This innovative case study sits at the heart of this thesis and describes in detail how these pieces were designed and constructed and how they relate to the wider cultures from which they emerged. The result of this is apparent in a number of outcomes. Firstly, the thesis offers a definitive summary of the key characteristics of Chippendale’s and Riesener’s work which will better enable practitioners (conservators, curators, collectors, etc.) to identify pieces made by these makers, analyze their condition and help conserve these important pieces of furniture: furniture history currently is over‐dependent on much more subjective approaches to this process of identification. Secondly, the thesis examines different aspects of furniture making in England and France (literature on the workshops, information on economic conditions, evidence relating to tools and materials etc.) and integrates them in such a way as to provide an authoritative account of the complex processes involved in the commissioning of such fashionable furniture. The thesis not only helps us better understand furniture making in England and France at a structural level during this key period of transition but also provides an original and systematic approach to writing a history around such material cultures, demonstrating how important it is to the full(est) comprehension of history that such fashionable objects be understood. Where other frequently more privileged objects (written documents, paintings and sculptures etc.) have been seen to provide valuable historical insights, this thesis argues that fashionable furniture can now be seen to provide its own unique perspectives on the time and on the society in which it was created.