I design furniture, installations and small spatial moments that let people who live alone in a city meet each other — lightly, without pressure.
BAODING · SHENZHEN FIELDWORK
Five projects moving from an object, to a room, to a whole village — each built around one question about how people share space.
BriefA light-reactive tower for solo-living young adults (22–30) in Shenzhen's urban villages. After work the 22 m² room is too small to stay in — the sky corridor, the courtyard void and the rooftop are the real living room.
SiteShuiwei Ningmeng Youth Apartment: 29 “handshake buildings” remade into 504 units for roughly 900 young residents — stitched by a 1.8 m sky corridor, seven colour-coded elevators and 29 coloured rooftops. Around 60% single, mostly 25–30, main unit 22.5 m².
IdeaThe tower lands on corridor junctions, the courtyard void and the rooftop edge. As people pass, the light answers — a soft anchor that turns “brushing past” into a moment of being seen, without forcing a conversation.
Why hereAltman's privacy regulation needs a semi-public threshold where a person can choose to approach or withdraw. The corridor gives exactly that edge; Gehl's rule — visible activity attracts activity — explains why one lit tower pulls a whole floor outside.
ConceptThe project takes “involution” — 内卷 — as its theme. I visualised the term as a tangle of wool: a knot tightening on itself. From that image I designed two chair versions — one with a more distinctive sculptural shape, one tuned for daily use.
ResearchThe metaphor was pushed outward — hair, brain, heart, movement — to test how far abstraction could go before the object stopped being usable furniture.
ProcessTwo parallel sketch series (Part 1: the wool nest; Part 2: the stacked-slat chair), a 1:5 scaled model, then a full-size cardboard prototype to check seat height and the visual weight of the knot.
OutcomeThe nest chair is deliberately uncomfortable and task-specific: you can only sit in it for a limited time. That discomfort is the point — an ergonomic argument about pressure, made as a piece of furniture you can try.
BriefA subliminal retail installation for adidas. The task was not to shout the logo but to let it work underneath: an object people walk toward before they understand why.
ResearchAudience study of street-culture consumers, then a mood board built around texture and enclosure — honeycomb grids, cellular surfaces, concrete blocks, layered blue — alongside the brand's own three-stripe geometry.
IdeaThe three stripes are distilled into a sculptural, cocoon-like volume — “breaking out of the cocoon” — a form that reads as shelter first and as branding second.
RealisationFrom mood board to engineering drawing to a full-scale build in a shopping-mall atrium, including the concentric floor graphics that turn the surrounding concourse into part of the piece.
ConceptAn amusement park for adults, sited inside a university teaching building. I took the slide — the thing every child loves most — and paired it with glass mirrors, so that going down also becomes a way of looking at yourself.
Who it is forAdults facing setbacks. The piece offers a short, voluntary regression: you climb, you slide, and for a few seconds you are not being assessed.
ProcessDesign inspiration → design manuscript (a long spiral study, from a single ribbon to a stacked helix) → site research in the teaching building → storyboard of the visitor's route.
OutcomeLeisure treated as a spatial act of healing rather than decoration — the structure has to be safe and legible enough that an adult will actually use it.
ContextA hollowed-out village that unfolds linearly along its water system. The intervention sits at the village edge — Zone B — where the slope is gentler and the old settlement still reads as a whole.
HeritageInspiration comes from the Dong ethnic group of Gaoyi Village and their Nuo opera masks: 85% of the village are Dong surnamed Yang, descendants of Yang Zai of the Southern Song, with settlement history traced back to the Yuan dynasty.
Architectural logicThe design combines the Dong stilt-house — cellar-like, raised on legs — with the Han courtyard house, producing a settlement shaped like a “grand-master chair” that sits into the contour rather than on top of it.
StrategyCluster layout follows the contour lines; roads and courtyards step with the terrain, creating a staggered spatial pattern that disturbs the original landscape as little as possible. Glass and wood throughout; play areas and living areas interwoven into a rural tourism resort for children and adults alike.
Five steps I repeat across furniture, installation and site-scale projects — from watching behaviour on site to testing the built thing with real people.
Route mapping, time-of-day logging and short interviews. Following Jan Gehl: visible activity attracts activity — so I record how people move, where they linger, and where they deliberately avoid.
Using Altman's privacy-regulation theory to locate the semi-public edge: the place where an introvert can either approach or withdraw without losing face.
Designing for a specific hour rather than a generic space — the after-work hour in the corridor, the dusk hour on the rooftop. One moment, one atmosphere.
Sketch series, 1:5 studies, full-size cardboard or timber prototypes, material and light tests. Proportion and tactile detail get checked in physical form, not on screen.
Put the thing in front of real users — residents, shoppers, students — and change what does not survive contact. A design is finished only when people have used it badly and it still works.
An object (a chair at 1:5), a room (a cocoon in a mall atrium), a site (a village on a contour). The scale changes the drawing set, not the method.
I am Rex Li Runze, a fourth-year Interior and Environmental Design student at HBU-UCLAN, the Hebei University — Lancaster University joint programme. My work sits between interior, product and social design.
I am drawn to in-between space: the corridor, the courtyard edge, the rooftop at dusk — the places where strangers brush past each other and nothing is supposed to happen. I design small, careful things that make those moments feel safe instead of awkward.
My projects move across scale for that reason. A chair that argues about pressure. A cocoon in a mall that shelters before it sells. A slide in a teaching building that lets an adult stop being assessed for eight seconds. A village edge that keeps its contours.
Right now my research sits in urban-village renewal in Shenzhen: how a 22 m² room pushes young people's social life out into shared corridors and rooftops, and what a single light can do about it.
Research-led and drawing-first. I begin from observation notes and sketch series rather than a style, then resolve the idea into a model that can be argued with.
Open to internships, collaborations and final-year project conversations — in interior, furniture or social design.