Project: AARM - Arm rest for a park bench.
Role: Concept.
Contributors: Tomonaga Tokuyama, Jin Kang.
Direction: Kevin Slavin, Area code

Research
Walls are built to define and defend a territory – to keep people out or keep them in. Maps shape the world and stretch the lines of limits around us, making us either the insiders or the outsiders. We usually think of territories as something strictly related to meters, maps, or areas. We see cases where a thin roll of wire is enough in countries around the world to define political borders. Sometimes it’s even thinner than a wire, maybe it is a surveillance camera or just a layer of paint that marks gang turf. And sometimes it is invisible altogether. A lot of territory exists only in the air or in the mind.

Not all territory is visible from the ground or the map or the lens of the satellite. Sometimes these are only traces; one needs to learn how to read them. Geometrical space is just one of the features that characterize territories. Experience, practices, feelings, habits, and even mood, also play an important role in the raise of territories. Human practices and preferences can create barriers between territories even when they are spatially very close to each other. More often the definition of a space exists in human practices and psychology: it’s just the way we use and interpret our environment.

A bag-pack or a newspaper kept in a seat in a public place immediately marks that the territory is already 'taken' or occupied. 2 people sitting in adjacent seats will define the territory with their body language. If they are acquaintances they will relax with their body posture creating an acute angle; if not they will create an obtuse angle. 2 strangers will sit back to back in a train rather than face to face, even if both the seats share a common back, which means that spatially the 2 strangers are actually sitting closer to one another than if they were sitting face to face. If 2 strangers are sitting on a park bench, one of them is likely to open his or her newspaper or wear sunglasses or put their handkerchief in the middle. If 2 friends are sitting on a bench, it is very less likely that a third person, a total stranger to the 2 friends, would come and sit alongside even if the bench were made for 3 people or more. All these actions mark territories in the mind though nothing logically exists in actual space. Everyday life, for all its unconscious acts, can be understood as a series of practices that give it its institutional meaning.

This project prompts and changes human dynamics beyond institutional, psychological, cultural, and habitual borders. It tries to see if designers can invade, capture, and affect a world on the move and the ongoing process of human relationships.