Skip to main content
Design Futures

Pei Haonan

Pei Haonan 🏳️‍🌈

裴昊楠🏳️‍🌈

Design, Branding, Marketing


Design projects fields ever participated

Product, Interior, Concept Vehicle, Packaging, UE/UX, UI, Experience,UCI, Fabric, Structural


Education Background

Design product, MA, Royal College of Art, London, 2019-2021

Industrial product & furniture design, BA, Istituto Marangoni, Milano, 2016-2019

Material Science & Physics, BA, Inner Mongolia University of Technology,2011-2015


Award

Winner of Istituto Marangoni's Product Design of the year 2019


https://peihaonan.com/ABOUT

👆👆👆You can know better about this lovely🔥 guy here

Degree Details

School of Design

Design Futures
Pei Haonan

I have prepared a lot to say for the graduation, but right now, what remains in my head is just sincere "thanks" to many supporters,

especially my tutors (Carolina💗, Alex💗, Claudia💗);

guest tutor (Gianluca💗, Oron💗);

my whole team (40+ collaborators separately located in four time zones💗💗💗) and

amazing DF peers (Boyu Ding💗, Yue Zhu💗).


The assessment was a challenging moment for me...no, that's not the point, sorry.

We made it.

The most important thing that DF has given me is not the design thinking or a broader view of the future but clear answers to primary questions for being a designer and being me.

What attracts me?

What sparks me?

Where is a trap?

What drags me back?

How is the smell of value?

What can f**k me up?

What is my strongest weapon?

Where might my projects end?

When should I give up?

And...

Who am I?

-INTRO

Who are we in a family? Mom? Dad? Somebody's legal guardian? That sounds great. But children who live in families without these typical roles can have plenty of love as well. Besides conveying responsibility relationship and blood bond, these labelling roles categories families.

If you have ever observed, sometimes people are hurt by this invisible border, especially children.

Families are diversifying, and the proportion of non-nuclear families is gradually increasing. This situation makes it necessary and urgent for us to question the rationality of family categorisation and explore the current identification system's dark side.

My response is an identification mechanism that is different from the legal and kinship status system. Relatively, it emphasises the human difference in natural attributes and the wholeness of all family members' identity, rather than assigning roles by labelling. In the utopia, Yugoo (the device) defines each family member with a short sound note. Sound identities are not labels nor comparable characteristic, which leads to the disappearance of family boundaries. 

-DECISIONS made for the Gallery exhibition : How to turn five strangers into a family?

I didn’t design a form for Yugoo because I believe that it has many possibilities. It can be shaped into a new category of household products, smart plug-ins or software integrated on existing sound equipment like Alexa or Siri. In the future, it even can be everywhere without any form. At this stage of the project, I think a “fine” prototype has no practical meaning, it is a limitation.


This experience requires the audiences to produce long-term footstep sound because only if, with a sufficient amount of sound data collected, Yugoo can identify the sound source as a family member. Due to facility restrictions, I decided to guide audiences to follow a certain route around the device, so I chose a cylindrical booth.


In order to let the audience integrate into the experiencing atmosphere of the Yugoo project as soon as possible, I added some functional props related to the family concept, such as a cylindrical booth, a cake and tableware. The cylinder is shaped like a round dining table, representing equality and sharing. The cake and tableware reflect that Yugoo gives every family member a sound identity that belongs to the same sweet chord, emphasizing the sense of wholeness while weakening the specific identity positioning and differentiation.


What Yugoo project opposes is the monopoly of using legal identity and kinship identity to define family members. So I decided to choose five strangers to experience my device. Usually, the audiences of the exhibition are strangers to each other. I just took advantage of this fact. I regarded this easy and reasonable decision as a speculative expression method.


For more informations about research, validation, iteration, value assessment and activism impact plan, please click the button below👇