Where UX Intersects with Art: Designing at the Intersection of Function and Aesthetics
A Physical Exploration
This project is an exploration of the intersection between conceptual art and UX design, driven by my fascination with the relationship between users and objects. I have long been intrigued by how usability, branding, and contextual factors shape our experience of everyday items. This work examines the absurdity embedded in functionality and the unexpected honor found in recontextualized design. By appropriating and altering objects, I seek to challenge perceptions, questioning how meaning is constructed and how interactions are influenced by both tangible and intangible forces.
As a result of this exploration, I decided to design and create five objects that challenge the relationship between users and the objects they interact with. Each piece serves as an experiment in recontextualization—questioning function, expectation, and meaning. By altering familiar forms, I sought to highlight the absurdity of usability, the influence of branding, and the emotional weight of designed experiences. These objects are not just physical artifacts but provocations, inviting users to reconsider their assumptions about everyday things.
1. La Petite Mort - The Scented Candle
Inspired by mass-market home comfort products, this candle subverts expectations. Unlike conventional scented candles, it contains dead flies encased in wax, recalling Damien Hirst’s fascination with mortality. The object questions our sensory-driven consumption and confronts our discomfort with decay, akin to how dark UX patterns subtly manipulate users.
2. Grandpa’s Chair - Memory as Interface
Chairs are universal, mundane, and deeply personal. This object wraps a vintage chair in transparent plexiglass, with inscriptions detailing its history and marks of wear. It functions as a UX prototype for memory preservation, akin to how digital interfaces archive user data. Inspired by Liu Xia’s poem Empty Chairs, this piece explores nostalgia and the emotional weight of familiar objects.
3. DHL Armchair - The Packaging of Comfort
This piece transforms a shipping crate into a chair, symbolizing the intersection of logistics and consumerism. Just as UX/UI designs frame digital experiences, the armchair redefines packaging as an ideological construct. The object prompts reflection on how we engage with brands and the commodification of everyday life.
4. Duct Tape Vase - Fragility in Design
A vase wrapped in silver duct tape highlights its potential breakage, questioning structural integrity and trust—an essential consideration in UX design. Like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped buildings, this piece conceals and reveals simultaneously, urging users to reconsider the fragility of objects and their perceived durability.
5. Human-Leg Stool - Animating the Inanimate
Referencing Martin Margiela’s deconstructivist approach, this stool replaces traditional legs with human-like ones, evoking unease. It deconstructs the boundary between object and body, making the mundane surreal. Similar to how UX/UI explores affordances and metaphors, this piece forces a reconsideration of how we define functional objects.
The Concept: UX Thinking in Art
In an era of mass digital and industrial reproduction, our relationship with objects is shaped by their semiotic layers and cultural connotations. This project explores appropriation art through a UX lens, deconstructing the meaning of everyday objects and questioning their role in contemporary life. By examining recontextualization, self-referentiality, deconstruction, and aesthetic function, the project challenges conventional object perception, much like UX/UI design challenges usability norms.
UX design involves understanding user interactions with products and environments. Similarly, this artistic exploration seeks to redefine objects by altering their function and perception. The collection consists of six objects, each designed to provoke thought about consumerism, semiotics, and personal memory.
Key Insights: Designing with Semiotics
By examining appropriation art through a UX perspective, we uncover parallels in user behavior, emotional response, and interaction design. Objects serve as touchpoints for experience, memory, and ideology—just as digital interfaces mediate our perception of information.
Design, whether artistic or digital, shapes our engagement with the world. By recontextualizing everyday objects, this project underscores the importance of semiotics in both physical and digital realms. Appropriation, like UX/UI, is an evolving dialogue between user, object, and meaning—a conversation that continuously reshapes the way we experience reality.