Furniture Design Based On Situation Construction To Prevent Empty Nesters From Falling

The aging population phenomenon is an important social problem in China today,and the empty-nesters,as a special and unique group,needs the care and attention from the society and the country.Therefore,the empty-nesters were selected as the research objects,and the falling issue of the elderly should not be ignored.The combination with empty-nesters,falling issue and the application of situation construction method were aimed at preventing empty-nesters from falling at home environment,as well as caring the physical and mental health of the elderly.Firstly,this work clarified the situation construction method and its related concepts,research elements and components,design steps and processes,etc.,extracting the features and principles of situation construction method and discussing the value of situation construction method in the design process by reading and sorting out materials,literature analysis and comparative research.Secondly,this work analyzed the factors of the falling situations of the empty-nesters at home,including the human factors,that is the analysis of the characteristics of the empty-nesters: the characteristics in basic attributes,external attributes and internal attributes;the product factors which are analyzed from three aspects: furniture types,potential falling situations in different areas,furniture design elements;environment elements,namely the falling reasons at home environment,including interior environment and exterior environment.Then,by means of user research,such as observation,interview,questionnaire,data analysis,card classification,cluster analysis and other methods,summarized the falling factors among the empty-nesters,furniture,home environment and their interactive relationships.Then,based on the above researches,three typical falling situations are summarized:(1)getting up at night in the bedroom;(2)cleaning living room at the end of the year;(3)storing idle electrical appliances on the top of the bookcase.Then established typical user roles and constructed situations,in addition,based on the three kinds of typical situations involved in the design of the furniture,put forward concrete strategies,in other words through cluster analysis from the aspects of furniture design elements——the outer layer(shape,structure,material,process),interactive layer(functional,interactive,man-machine)and emotional layer,carried out classification integration,putting forward the final design strategies.Then summarized design principles which were individed into three categories: falling prevention,reducing falling damages and self-saving after falling,including adjustability,stability,indexicality,practicality and durability;buffering,emergency;timeliness and perspectiveness.Finally,several design practices of drawer,bed,chair and table were carried out by means of modeling.The paper has 128 figures,51 tables,and 101 references.