The brief was a play installation for public spaces. What I drew was a sit-on cicada with a cajón inside it — one object that holds two behaviors at once: you can rest on it like furniture, or strike it like an instrument, and the form does not pick a side.
Industrial Design · 2014
Cicada Chase 逐蟬
A sit-on percussion installation for neighborhood parks. Cajón body, bamboo-cicada silhouette: the chair you sit on is the drum you play.
01 · Form
A chair you also drum
02 · The walk
What I kept writing down
Over a few Saturday afternoons in 台南 between studio assignments, I walked through neighborhood parks within five minutes of campus and sketched what children actually did with the equipment installed for them.
The note that kept repeating: moulded-plastic playgrounds are prescribed play. Climb the ladder, go down the slide, walk back to the ladder. The behavior the equipment wants is single-output. The kids who weren’t on the equipment were the ones doing the interesting thing: slapping rhythms on the bench beside their grandmother, drawing on rubber tiles with a found stick, spinning a bamboo-cicada toy in cupped palms.
I started asking: what would a playground object look like if it permitted those side-channel behaviors as the main thing?
Field A · The bench The play happens around the equipment, not on it.
Field B · The latent drummer Any flat surface is a drum if no one stops you.
Field C · The handover The folk toy that knew: form makes sound when touched.
03 · The bet
Two references in one drawing
From the walk, two references slid onto the same page in my sketchbook — one furniture, one folk toy, both already chairs of the body.
- Cajón The box drum you sit on and play between your knees. Already a chair-and-instrument hybrid. Public-park-friendly: low, broad base, no moving parts.
- 竹蟬 Bamboo cicada The folk toy whose entire purpose is producing a sound when played with. The silhouette I wanted: rounded body, wing flange overhead, opening at one end as the resonator slot.
- The hybrid A sit-on form whose shape itself reads as something that wants to be touched and to make sound. Cicada silhouette as design language; cajón geometry as the structural rule.
04 · The form & colour
One shell, two interchangeable parts
Body: arched cajón shell, hollow inside for tone. Wing flange: a single curved sheet that lifts off the body to read as the cicada’s membrane and acts as a hand-rest when sitting. Resonator slot: cut into the front face, the same horizontal opening that gives a cajón its bass.
Body and wing are separate mouldings. The proposal lets a purchaser (a park, a school, a daycare) spec each shell’s colour independently and pair them freely. A park can plant a small flock of cicadas that read as siblings rather than identical units.
05 · In play
Two kids, two chairs, one rhythm
The reason a flock matters: one chair is furniture, two chairs are a call-and-response. The body that drums learns faster when there’s another body drumming back.
06 · What stayed open
What this project didn’t do
I never built a 1:1 prototype. Never installed it in a park. Never sat with kids for a Saturday to watch them drum on it. It stayed at form-proposal: Rhino model, sketches, paper mock-ups in studio. The acoustic claim (“it’s a cajón”) is an analogy I drew, not a tuning that was measured.
If this proposal had a second life now, the first step would be a 1:1 in a real park for two weeks, with a phone on a tripod. The form was the easy part. The validation it needs is the work I haven’t done yet.