Design in meeting spaces

The gathering spaces are those places, such as museums, squares, shopping centers etc., in which integration, sharing, solidarity etc. are favored. They are complex places, therefore, a good design of furnishing accessories has to take into account several factors, often in contrast with each other such as aesthetics and functionality, convivial participation and privacy, individual needs and collective needs.

It can be seen how, over time, we have gone through a self-referential design to an inclusive model that is open to the needs of the community and to the nature of places, aimed at the well-being of the community and the common good. In a perspective in which design stands as an instrument through which society communicates its values ​​(culture, beauty, solidarity, etc.), the Domino project stands as an interpreter of the needs of modern intercultural society, a community in which different individuals maintain their values ​​and culture while collaborating with each other.

The project

Domino is an assembled system of benches with a “double identity”, an individual and a collective one; each bench can, in fact, stand alone or combine with the others, proceed in a straight line or change direction without, therefore, losing its peculiarity.

Its compositional flexibility allows the user to modify, manage and dynamically compose his/her relationship with others allowing him/her to choose whether to be alone or in a group, in orderly files or in asymmetrical connections.

The basic module is a parallelepiped with a square base, Cube bench (50 cm x 50 cm x 50 cm) while the “jolly” element is a parallelepiped with a rectangular base, Gold bench (50 cm x 70 cm x 50 cm).

It is inspired by a board game of the same name, an ancient pastime born in China in the tenth century. In the game, the tiles (or cards) are placed on a plane and the players, in turn, will have to put a new tile on the previous one in order to form a continuous succession of tiles. A particular card, called “double”, can be hooked orthogonally to change the direction of the chain, in this way it will form a snake that will never be closed.

In the Domino project, the key element is the Cube bench which represents the consideration for a single “tile” of the game of the same name. By placing the benches / tiles together, a linear and continuous succession is obtained. This union takes place through a simple mortise and tenon interlocking mechanism: on one side of the cube there is, in fact, a protrusion while on the opposite side a corresponding hole. By fitting together, the benches will take on a new compact and unitary block configuration.