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The furniture tourist : escaping the habitue : an exegesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of Masters of Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Kenneth Bayes describes two ways in which we move through space. The first as a ‘tourist’ and the second as the ‘habitué’. The tourist is an “exploratory through an unknown environment” (Porter, 1997, p. 44) - which is juxtaposed against the habitué, who is “the habitual through a known environment” (Porter, 1997, p. 44). Each concept is the other’s polar opposite. The habitué is bound by routine, while the tourist is active and engaging in their environment, discovering new possibilities and exciting alternatives. The tourist looks upon their environments with fresh eyes. They are open, receptive and able to imagine possibilities where forms in rooms bend, waver and swell. Imagining tells stories which provoke and expand our thoughts. It allows one to escape preconceptions about the nominal nature of objects and our relationship with them. This research explores these characters, the habitué and the tourist, in relation to furniture and its arrangement within the interior. It investigates how the habitué may over time become the tourist in their own familiar environment. I am the tourist within this research who activates drawing, making, writing and photography as productive processes of imagining exciting alternatives for furniture. Through my work I seek to trigger, for the habitué, their imagination by allowing them to enter into mine through photography, expanding what they originally perceived of furniture.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/233917
Date January 2008
CreatorsApthorp, Jane Frances
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish

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