Comfort in design: perception, materiality, and form

My work has always centered around comfort, warm tones, soft curves, and forms that feel immediately welcoming. These qualities have shaped everything I make, from seating to wallcoverings to interior objects. But the more I design, the more I realize that comfort isn’t a universal language. It shifts depending on where someone is from, what they grew up with, and the materials their body has learned to trust. This realization pushed me to question what comfort means within my own practice.

To explore this, I created a seat made from metal and concrete, materials that are visually cold, physically rigid, and generally associated with discomfort. Yet the chair itself is surprisingly comfortable. This contradiction has become the core of my research. It forces me to look beyond the visual cues I usually rely on and instead examine how comfort emerges from the relationship between material, form, and the body.

This thesis investigates the difference between the comfort we expect and the comfort we experience. It considers how perception, memory, and familiarity shape our assumptions, and how design can challenge those assumptions without sacrificing usability. By contrasting my established aesthetic with this new, materially uncomfortable work, I aim to expand my understanding of comfort and redefine how it operates within my practice. Ultimately, this research seeks to uncover how comfort is constructed, perceived, and felt.