Street furniture and night: Design for contemporary lifestyles

When the politics, economy and culture of a country progress to a new stage, variation in night life is a primary characteristic reflecting the social movement. Urban citizens continuously explore the diverse time schedule and further extend the length of the nocturnal period. By comparison, the historic footprint has witnessed the different scenes in the night time as the result of the limitation of authority, culture, as well as technology. This paper is to utilize the street furniture as an intermediate to uncover the variation of the nocturnal lifestyle, and thereby identity developments that have led to current street furniture design. This paper embarks on the definitions and history of night and street furniture, and accordingly the dynamic evidences would be obtained in terms of the different managing of mental and cultural consideration. To efficiently serve this kind of 24-hour society, comprehensive requirements of street furniture would be raised in view of the aspects of safety, entertainment, technology as well as psychology and so forth. Consequently, all-round design principles would be put forward to meet emerging nocturnal milieu and increasingly contemporary lifestyle demands. This paper also uses the street furniture as case study to find out innovative approaches to make up for the defciencies of public design amid the night time consideration.