8 Secret Hiding Spots in Ordinary Objects
This ingenious thesis project takes ordinary household items like lamps, coffee cups and wood desks and turns them into secret stash housing for money, valuables and other things you want to keep hidden at all costs – right in plain site. And do not bother looking for the drawer handle in this desk: it requires a magnet placed in just the right spot to pull it open – could it get any safer? Even if you guessed the space was there, you could not access it!
The compelling theory behind these designs goes something like this: we have mental “blind spots” about certain ordinary furniture and furnishing objects, and take for granted that we understand how they work at a glance – these visual cues, however, can be our undoing as they cause us to overlook the obvious.
A lamp seems like an impossible hiding spot, since it would fry anything around the light bulb, right? Not anymore, as this cash stash lighting fixture shows. And a stack of papers seems a flimsy and predictable pile amidst the mess of a typical apartment – would would expect there to be compartments hidden inside, just like the classic (but far too predictable) hide-a-safe books?
In the words of the designer, Yiting Cheng “Why doing this? We all have the need of hiding. We hide our valuables from being stolen, we conceal our past from our loved ones, we never show our real side to colleagues, we all have secrets.
Or, sometimes we just want to keep something only for ourselves. We make judgments based mainly on our experiences and what we see. This dependency on visual information can create large blind spots. Thus, usual stereotypes of how we perceive solid, transparency and lighting are employed in this project to play with notions of ?solid and void?, and ?true and false?
