Welcome to Planet boing!

Planet boing is a design studio for body-minded furniture. What's more important, however, is that it is a place for experimental living and for hatching new ideas. Ultimately, our designs are dreaming of another planet; a planet like Earth, except that it is a lot more boing.

Why make the world better if it can be made more boing, right?

What does boing mean? The shortest definition of the word "boing" is that it is the inverse of the word "meta".

Meta

Meta typically means "of a higher order" and it is often self-referential; thinking about thinking, data about data, etc. In other words, meta is "aboutness". Meta doesn't mix; it doesn't touch things; it only observes them from a distance. To a meta-observer, the world is a hierarchy of different levels that are each distinct and irreducible.

boing

boing is the inverse of meta in the sense that boing sees that the different levels of the hierarchy are strikingly similar to each other in their behavior. In fact, talking about them in terms of "levels" is already too meta. They are rather structures in a nested sequence that are fluid and familiar.

The world is not a hierarchy, it is boing all the way down.

As an onomatopoeia, the word "boing" bridges the gap between human language and the more-than-human world. In fact, what boing reveals is that there is no gap to begin with... boing?

Clothing

On planet boing buildings are literally designed as a type of clothing; A type of clothing that is simply too big to be worn by a single person “at once”, but has to be worn over the course of a day, a year, possibly multiple generations, and in communion with other people.

How do you wear a house?

The buildings-as-clothing-metaphor helps designers and architects to look differently at how buildings can be designed. It immediately puts one in the right “body-mindedness” for designing more playful, more intimate and more movement-oriented buildings. Since the primary way you relate to clothing is with your body, this metaphor turns the modernist conception of buildings as living machines upside-down (or rather inside-out).

Click anywhere in the screen for nightvision!

From this metaphor many interesting questions follow: How could buildings be soft? Could spaces be foldable? Why don't walls come with pockets? Can doors have zippers and buttons? What is the underwear of a building? Can buildings be dressed up for winter and stripped down for summer?

Designing a planet starts with furniture

An important characteristic of the furniture and buildings on planet boing is their “syrupiness”

Syrupiness

The concept of syrupiness can be used to describe liquids that behave solid-like or solids that behave liquid-like. Examples of solids that behave liquid-like are: springs, rope, rubber, fabric, foam, paper, etc. Examples of liquids that behave solid-like are mostly of biological origin, such as the cells and tissues of animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.

On planet boing there are no chairs except in museums of torture

Insight #14: One-on-one correspondences with the human body need to be avoided. Furniture doesn't need seats, armrests or backrests to be usable as furniture. Such obvious correspondences kill the need for exploration.

boingism #90: People often wonder whether humans can survive living in a spaceship, but the real question is: can they survive living in a house?