Plug-in Elements for Urban Furniture — a study of how public space writes the rhythms we live inside, and an attempt to alter one of them from within.
This thesis investigates how public spaces act as sites of ideological control, operating as mechanical apparatuses that produce "desired citizens" through standardised, affirmative design languages. It argues that contemporary urban design and architecture reinforce systemic order by replacing genuine spatial creation with formulaic, pre-approved frameworks.
To counter this condition, the research proposes psycho-rhythmic analysis: a theoretical framework that positions play not as ornament but as an anthropological language, and as a spatial countermeasure capable of injecting chaos, encounter and opportunity into otherwise curated environments.
The investigation examines the structural role of play across three distinct media — Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle, the work of the Section d'Or group in painting, and Constant Nieuwenhuys's architectural vision of New Babylon, read alongside Cedric Price's Fun Palace. To test the theory in practice, a prototype was developed consisting of plug-in extensions for public benches — an everyday, non-curated urban element.
How can existing public spaces be hacked and transformed into sites of encounter and opportunity, rather than remaining spaces of numbing comfort that produce desired citizens?
And how can the phenomenon of play be used — not as a decorative element, but as a linguistic design approach — to create uncurated spaces that leave room for chaos rather than order?
Public space has never truly belonged to the collective. It functions instead as an instrument for the specific ideologies and interests of dominant authorities — governmental structures, lobbyists, private corporations, and equally political and religious movements exercising comparable influence over civil life. This power is exercised through legislative shifts or pseudo-legal frameworks that reconfigure civic architecture, societal norms, and the very essence of daily routine.
Public space operates as a site of social production. It functions much like a factory, in which the elements of our environment — the spatial language, the defined functions, the tangible thresholds — orchestrate the rhythms of daily life. These rhythms crystallise into habits, and habits solidify into culture, which then provides a self-justifying framework for the status quo.
Within this context, the architectural and urban design professions have increasingly abandoned genuine creation in favour of deploying memorised approaches. By designing through pre-approved, formulaic guidelines, architects do not merely build; they reinforce systemic order. Consequently, even interventions such as public art or installations are reduced to bread crumbs — superficial apparatuses against alienation that pacify the public while obscuring the deeper, mechanical control inherent in the design language itself.
The research is grounded in an anthropological reading of play, developed through close engagement with the work of two contemporary new-media practitioners. Both demonstrate how simple, low-threshold interactions can generate entire situations of discovery, and this observation forms the conceptual starting point of the thesis.
In Anadol's installation, particles reacted quickly or slowly according to physical laws, much like kicking snow across the ground. Having witnessed the work firsthand, I observed how it drew out spontaneous, childhood-rooted play: people made snow angels, staged impromptu games of football, or tried to trigger the largest possible particle explosion. What became clear was a two-step process — people first had to understand the space and how it responded to them, and only then did they begin to discover it through play.
Lewin's practice offers a more analogue counterpart. Installed in public outdoor settings, where people move through daily life largely on autopilot, an accidental trigger interrupts that subconscious state and shifts them into a heightened awareness of their surroundings — which is itself a trigger for further discovery.
Taken together, these works suggest that play is not merely leisure but an anthropological mode of communication, comparable to language itself. Seen through this lens, media installations in public space function simultaneously as toys and as architectural elements.
Three works from three different media were chosen to demonstrate how the idea of play is a core element within each medium, and how each medium is in turn interconnected through the idea of linguistics.
A critique not only of modern architecture but of the very idea of modernity. It mocks that ideology by locating its critique within the space itself, rather than confining it to situations or dialogue. For this reason it is used here to discuss space both as apparatus and as media — the Villa Arpel's choreographed geometry set against the ramshackle, illegible accretion of Mr. Hulot's house.
The group brought Cubism together with Orphism, which retained Cubism's fragmented, multi-angle structure while prioritising colour and light, drawing that heightened colour from Fauvism — fauve, "wild beast." The palette is deliberately vicious, chosen to convey emotion rather than depict reality. Holding both tendencies together produces two layers of narrative: the subject the artist shares, and a meta-layer in which the style itself becomes a dialogue between structure and chaos.
New Babylon approaches play through polyrhythm — the simultaneous layering of different, seemingly chaotic rhythms — generating encounter by creating elements rather than staging situations. Read alongside Price's Fun Palace, both are examined critically: each identified alienation correctly and turned to play as its remedy, yet both treated play as an event to be staged rather than as a psychological rhythm. In doing so, each proposed a new circle inside the existing one rather than interpreting the circle already in place.
Architecture is the toy of the magic circle we call civilization: it represents ideas and determines the actions available within the game, curating our movement and, through that curation, building our habits. Lefebvre argues in Rhythmanalysis that the actions of daily life determine the rhythm of that life. What I propose to add is this: the daily language with which we continually interact in our surroundings determines not only our rhythms but our habits, our behaviour, and ultimately our personalities.
When we walk, the pathways have already been defined for us. When we buy a cup of coffee, the places where we may sit have already been decided. When we cycle or run, the routes are laid out in advance. None of these definitions is a problem in itself. The difficulty is that when everything in our lives has already been defined and labelled, the result is a lack of event — and redundancy produces monotony.
There are, however, structures that interrupt this. Each produces a different rhythmic effect because each is unorthodox relative to the architectural language surrounding it. The crucial point is that this effect is not confined to the people who use these buildings; it reaches the ordinary passer-by who merely shares the path. A building that interrupts the language of the street interrupts it for everyone who passes, including those who never chose to encounter it. It does not ask for participation. It changes the rhythm of a route people were already walking.
This is what psycho-rhythmic analysis means: an account of how architectural elements exert rhythmic effects on our emotional and psychological health, and of how those effects accumulate into habit, behaviour, and persona. Rather than proposing a new circle in which play might take place, the aim is to work on the toys the existing circle already contains, and to alter — one element at a time — the rhythm those toys currently write.
If the elements of public space and their design language function as the guideline for our actions, then the most direct way to test the theory is to work on the public furniture that already exists, and to ask how it might be adjusted, or hacked. The reasoning draws on two arguments from Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things: the distinction between conscious and subconscious action, and what Norman calls opportunistic action.
The alteration has to be sufficient to catch attention and provoke curiosity, and no more than that — there is a fine line between triggering curiosity and producing unease. If the alteration is aggressive, the object is converted into an installation to be regarded rather than a piece of furniture to be used. The proposal therefore has to be radical enough to shift participants into active engagement, and familiar enough that no one hesitates before touching it.
The test site was the open area behind the main building of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, in front of the Atelier. Three benches stand there, all of the same common municipal type: weathered timber slats on a galvanised steel frame, 120 cm long and 45 cm high, of which the timber accounts for 5 cm.
The ordinariness of this object is not incidental to the choice; it is the reason for it. If the aim is to test whether an existing element of public space can be altered enough to shift a person from passive to active participation, then the correct test case is not an interesting object but an invisible one. A bench that already attracted attention would prove nothing.
The dimensions of the bench determined the dimensions of everything that followed. With the timber accounting for 5 cm of the 45 cm total, the underside of the seat sits at 40 cm, and this figure became the governing unit of the entire system. Rather than beginning with a form and adapting it to the site, the site set the module.
The proposal required a language of parts rather than a single designed object. This led to the adoption of a tetris language: a family of modules whose plan geometry is derived from tetromino shapes, so that pieces of different form share a common 40 × 40 cm grid and can be combined in a large number of configurations. Any module, in any orientation, meets the bench at its own height. It is the drawing of this vocabulary, rather than any individual module, that constitutes the design proposal — the parts are not a set of objects but a system for producing arrangements.
The first attempt at connection used a rail routed directly into the 16 mm MDF. It failed: the material remaining either side of the channel was too thin, and the fibre gave way under load. The failure was in the material rather than the principle, and the principle was worth keeping, since a sliding connection is one a person can operate without instruction.
The solution was to move the joint onto the board's edge — routing away half the depth, 8 mm of the 16 mm, to produce an L-shaped rebate. The adjoining piece carries the matching rebate, so the two step into one another and close flush. The rebate is itself the rail. A module brought up against its neighbour follows the L-profile down into position and can only seat one way; the geometry does the locating, so a person assembling the piece does not need to know how it goes together in order to put it together correctly.
The relationship to the bench itself is the point at which the proposal is at its most direct. The large curved module runs on wheels, which allow it to slide along the length of the bench and be set wherever the user chooses. Nothing is fixed to the bench, nothing is removed from it, and no tool is required. The existing element is neither replaced nor damaged, and yet its configuration — and with it the arrangement of bodies it produces — is now determined by the person using it rather than by whoever specified it.
The modules were built from 16 mm MDF, cut into 40 × 40 cm and 80 × 40 cm panels. Into each panel a slot was cut to serve as a hand hold. These openings perform two functions at once: they allow a module to be lifted and carried by one person, and they announce, before anything else about the object is understood, that the object is meant to be picked up. A fixed piece of street furniture has no handles. An element that does is already saying something about itself.
The largest component is the curved module that seats three tetris pieces, formed by kerf bending. The first attempt failed — the kerfed section was cut short of the span required — and the second, made at the correct length, worked without difficulty. The difference between them is not a difference of method but of measurement, which is the more common way that a fabrication step fails.
Each module carries its own power supply and its own behaviour. Nothing is wired between modules and nothing is connected to mains power — a requirement of the proposal rather than a convenience: a plug-in element that depends on a fixed power source is no longer something a person can pick up and put down where they choose.
Power comes from two 18650 lithium cells feeding a purpose-built board with a voltage regulator and charging module, delivering a regulated 5 V. Of the three modules built, two were configured for sound and one for light.
The switching logic is the part of the electronic system that carries the most meaning. I did not want the modules to run continuously; I wanted them to turn on at the moment of connection, so that the user receives a reaction to something they have just done. Each module holds a magnet and a Hall effect sensor, and powers on only when its sensor detects the magnet of an adjoining piece. There is no switch, no button and no timer.
A module standing alone does nothing at all. Only when two pieces are brought together does either begin to behave — the electronic response is not a reward for approaching the object but a reward for configuring it.
The structure was tested during summaery2026, the annual exhibition of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The observations recorded are informal: no formal protocol was used, no participants were recruited, and nothing was measured. Arrows were painted onto the module faces and insertion points picked out in colour, but no written instructions, diagram or tutorial accompanied the structure on site.
The location worked. Nobody travelled to the Plug-In Bench. It stood on a route people were already walking, and those who encountered it did so in the course of doing something else — the distinction this thesis drew between itself and the Fun Palace held in practice.
The seating arrangement changed. Because the modules met the bench at an angle, people faced one another instead of facing outward. Several described the effect, unprompted, as a conversation pit, and said they had enjoyed sitting that way.
Children and adults behaved differently. Children approached without hesitation, entered the tunnel beneath the modules, climbed on it and played around it. Adults looked, waited, and in many cases asked whether they were allowed.
Some visitors read the structure as an artwork and treated it as something to be looked at rather than used. This is exactly the failure mode predicted in the design principle set out earlier: an alteration which is too assertive converts the object into an installation to be regarded. Having named that risk in advance, it would be dishonest not to record that it occurred. A related and smaller version of the same problem is that several people did not sit down because the paint looked wet — surface finish operates as a signifier independently of anything the graphics say.
The second failure is more significant, because it concerns the central claim. Over the entire exhibition, nobody attempted to assemble, disassemble or reconfigure the structure. The modularity that the whole system exists to provide was never exercised by a user. The reason is not mysterious: when asked, people said they had not known reconfiguration was possible, and nothing had told them so. This is precisely Norman's distinction between an affordance and a signifier. The structure afforded reconfiguration; what it lacked was anything telling a person they were permitted to do so. The claim was not disproven by the test — it was not tested.
The answer this thesis developed is that both questions run through rhythm. Public space produces citizens not by instructing them but by writing the rhythms they live inside, and any intervention that hopes to return agency to those citizens has to work at that level rather than at the level of the event.
What the prototype established is that the site, the scenario and the instrument were correctly chosen. The bench was the right object: ordinary enough to be invisible, public enough to be shared, and small enough to be altered by one person without permission. The aim of producing a seating arrangement rather than an attraction was the right aim, and it worked.
The clearest evidence for the underlying hypothesis came from the children. They approached without hesitation and produced exactly the unplanned, uncurated interaction the whole proposal exists to generate. That is not a small result: it demonstrates that the object was capable of producing what it was designed to produce, and that the obstacle lay elsewhere.
The obstacle lay in the design. The structure is technologically simple and its interaction narrow. More seriously, the piece contains real errors of use. In attempting to signal that the object was interactive, I used more colour and more graphic marking than the object needed, and the result may have pushed it across the line I identified in advance. The failure mode was one I had named before building, and I built it anyway.
What the work produced is a direction with evidence pointing along it, not a demonstration.
Two constraints stand between this proposal and any real deployment, and they should be stated plainly because this thesis did not solve them. An object placed in public space without supervision is subject to theft and damage. And MDF, batteries and printed plastic are appropriate to a prototype and inappropriate to street furniture expected to survive weather and years of use. Any serious version would have to begin from materials and a maintenance model rather than from form.
What this thesis contributes, then, is not a finished object but a way of reading. Psycho-rhythmic analysis proposes that the elements of public space act on us through rhythm rather than through instruction, that those rhythms build habits and personas beneath the level of conscious choice, and that an intervention wishing to interrupt them must work inside the rhythm that already exists rather than constructing an alternative beside it. The Plug-In Bench is an argument for that proposition made in material rather than in text — an incomplete argument, but one whose failures are as informative as its successes.