Project Overview

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This project was my Bachelor’s degree final project in Industrial Design at KMITL’s Faculty of Architecture, where I sought to approach design through a social development lens. Rather than merely reimagining an object, I aimed to explore how design can serve as a catalyst for social impact, bridging industrial production with human-centered craftsmanship.

To deepen this approach, I collaborated with Thailand’s Ministry of Justice, Department of Corrections, to explore opportunities where design knowledge and skills could contribute to social rehabilitation and skill development. The project examined how craft-based interventions could be integrated into industrially manufactured objects, creating a hybrid model that enhances both economic and social value.

By incorporating strategic thinking and product-service system design, this project envisions a pathway for product design to be more than just a product, but a strategic action to create impact further than just commercializing. This fusion of thinking not only redefines the furniture design but also serves as a symbol of transformation, illustrating how design can intersect with social policy, rehabilitation, and industrial design.

Through this project, I aimed to push the boundaries of industrial design, demonstrating its potential to shape systems, empower communities, and drive positive social change.

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Key Insights

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1. Rising Material Costs
   The Bangkok Remand Prison primarily uses premium materials for its handcrafted products. However, material costs continue to rise, making it difficult to achieve profitability. Given the low selling prices, breaking even is a challenge, limiting the program’s ability to generate sustainable financial support for prisoners upon release.
2. Rigid Work Schedules & Slow Production
   Due to the strict daily schedule, prisoners have only four hours per day to work on their products. As a result, completing a single product takes over a week, slowing down production capacity. This impacts the prison’s ability to meet customer demand, making it difficult to maintain a consistent stock for sales.
3. Outdated Design Due to Limited References
   Prisoners do not have internet access, restricting their exposure to contemporary design trends. Their only available references are old home & décor magazines, leading to outdated designs that struggle to attract modern consumers. This limits the marketability of their products and affects sales potential.
4. Manufacturing Errors & Lack of Precision
   Every product is handcrafted from sketch to final assembly, leading to higher margins of error and inconsistencies in manufacturing. Without access to precision tools or digital fabrication, achieving standardized quality is challenging, making it harder to compete with mass-produced alternatives.
5. Siloed Training Programs & Limited Skill Integration
   Prison vocational courses are separated by material disciplines—woodworking, metalwork, rattan weaving, pottery, and textiles are all taught independently. This structure prevents prisoners from combining skills across materials, limiting their ability to create innovative, mixed-material designs that could have higher market appeal. Without cross-disciplinary learning, their design potential remains narrow and traditional, further contributing to low sales and market competitiveness.

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Opportunity

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With rising costs, slow production, outdated designs, manufacturing inconsistencies, and siloed training, the current system makes it difficult for the prison to scale production and generate significant profits. To ensure sustainable economic support for prisoners, the program needs to adopt new strategies that:

• Introduce cost-effective materials or optimize material usage.
• Improve production efficiency without compromising craftsmanship.
• Provide updated design references to align with market trends.
• Implement manufacturing techniques that reduce errors while maintaining handcrafted value.
• Foster cross-disciplinary training, allowing prisoners to integrate woodworking, metalwork, and other skills into more marketable designs.

By addressing these challenges, the prison can enhance product quality, market appeal, and profitability, ultimately creating a more effective vocational training and rehabilitation model.

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Design Development

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I developed three design alternatives and, after a careful analysis of feasibility, production efficiency, and material costs, I chose to move forward with the first direction, a furniture design that features a teak wood main structure with rattan detailing.

This approach provides several key advantages:

• Faster Manufacturing Time – The teak wood structure simplifies the assembly process, reducing production time compared to fully woven rattan furniture.
• Craftsmanship Aesthetic – The rattan elements maintain the handcrafted appeal, ensuring that the final product still reflects artisanal quality.
• Cost Reduction – Rattan is one of the most expensive materials in the furniture market, and by minimizing its usage, this design remains economically viable while preserving its visual and material richness.

By prioritizing efficiency, affordability, and aesthetics, this design direction strikes a balance between traditional craftsmanship and production feasibility, making it an ideal solution within the prison workshop’s constraints while enhancing the market competitiveness of the final product.

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The design concept for this collection is “Embrace”, embodying a sense of warmth, comfort, and welcome. Inspired by the idea of a gentle embrace, the design features soft curves and smooth radii, creating an inviting and homely aesthetic.

By incorporating organic shapes and flowing lines, the furniture evokes a sense of ease and relaxation, making it not just a functional piece but also a symbol of care and hospitality. The combination of teak wood and rattan detailing enhances this feeling, balancing the strength of structure with the softness of craftsmanship. This design approach ensures that each piece is not only visually inviting but also emotionally resonant, offering a gesture of warmth and connection in any space.

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Final Design

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The final design embraces the integration of multiple craft techniques, encouraging prisoners to collaborate across different vocational courses and experiment with new materials and methods. By breaking the traditional single-material approach, this design fosters skill-sharing and allows for a more dynamic learning experience within the prison workshop.

One of its key strengths is its flexibility in both size and materials. While the prototype is crafted from wood and rattan, the design has been carefully structured to allow for material variations. It is intentionally divided into two distinct parts, the structural core and the decorative elements. This modular approach ensures that different materials can be substituted in future adaptations, making the design highly versatile for metal, rattan, wood, or even mixed-material construction.

By enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration, this design not only enhances production efficiency but also broadens creative possibilities, providing prisoners with a more holistic skillset. Ultimately, this approach strengthens both the economic value and market potential of the final product while reinforcing the importance of adaptive, inclusive design thinking in vocational training programs.

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Gå-rd collection, pronounced as “Gord” which means embrace in the Thai language, is a collection of furniture that can be used indoors and outdoors. Gå-rd collection is able to customize the color of rattan and sizes due to customer demands. This collection is capable of manufacturing in an industrial-craft workflow.

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Validation

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To validate this project, I conducted a product refinement test within the real manufacturing process alongside prisoners at Bangkok Remand Prison. The goal was to assess production feasibility, material efficiency, and skill integration, ensuring that the design could be effectively implemented within the prison’s constraints.

This project integrates woodworking and rattan weaving, traditionally taught as separate disciplines. The hands-on collaboration led to an unexpected yet positive outcome, prisoners from the wood workshop expressed interest in learning rattan weaving, while rattan workshop participants wanted to explore carpentry. This cross-disciplinary collaboration fostered friendships, encouraged skill-sharing, and motivated prisoners to enroll in additional training courses, creating a more engaged and versatile workforce.

Beyond skill development, the project also introduced cost and production efficiencies:

• Material Optimization – The design simplifies structural components, reducing material costs by 35% while maintaining the same selling price.
• Increased Workforce & Efficiency – By dividing tasks between woodworking and rattan weaving, more prisoners could participate, reducing the overall production timeline.
• Precision & Speed Enhancement – The introduction of molds and jigs streamlined fabrication, minimizing errors and improving production speed by 50%.

By fostering collaboration, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, this project not only enhances vocational training outcomes but also strengthens economic opportunities for prisoners, making rehabilitation efforts more sustainable and impactful.

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After successfully validating the design, I developed a framework and handed it off to the Ministry of Justice for implementation in other prisons across Thailand. This framework serves as a guideline for prison workshops, helping them design and produce products that align with their specific context, ensuring both economic viability and skill development.

The framework is built upon a synthesis of internal and external factors:

• Internal Factors – Each prison has unique expertise, available tools, and structured prisoner routines, which influence the feasibility of different craft and production techniques.
• External Factors – To ensure market relevance, the framework incorporates design trends, customer preferences, and material availability, helping prisons create sellable, modern products that cater to current consumer demands.

By considering these factors, this framework enables prisons to develop context-appropriate products, optimize workflow efficiency, and improve craft-based vocational training. More importantly, it provides a scalable and adaptable model that can be tailored to different correctional facilities, ultimately enhancing prisoners’ skill development, employability, and economic sustainability upon release.

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This project was selected as one of the 15 Best Product Design Theses at Degree Show 2019, the largest design thesis competition in Thailand. This recognition highlights its innovative approach to social impact design, integrating craftsmanship, vocational training, and systemic change to create a scalable solution for prison-based manufacturing.

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