On Comfort(s)

Although physical comfort is a self-evidently important goal in interior design projects, whose definition is usually assumed to be obvious and straightforward (a measurable outcome of the interaction of material and anatomical variables), in practice comfort has proven itself one of the most mysterious of human spatial possibilities. Comfort has radically shifted its meanings across historical epochs and across cultures. Rather than a simple and quantifiable spatial reality, comfort should be understood as a malleable social ideology – comfort as the unstable consequence of cultural ideas about bodies, including ideas about gender, class, decorum, custom, and race, overlaid onto shifting technological, material, economic, social and ideological circumstances. Understood this way, physical comfort can be reanimated as a pliable design variable – as it has shifted previously, so it can be reshaped today. The goal of this visual essay, crafted as seven open-ended drawings framed by short introductory observations, is to pry comfort loose from simplistic understandings and invite new investigations into its mysteries and future possibilities.