004 → Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
Who’s Afraid of Public Spaces was born in the midst of COVID, when the notion of gathering in public became fraught with unease. Leading this collaborative project, I invited a group to reflect on how fear, love, and anxiety shape our encounters with shared environments. From our discussions, we distilled the triggers that define public spaces—monuments of infrastructure and fleeting objects alike—and transformed them into a visual language.
Through an online workshop, each participant designed a letter of the phrase “Public Spaces”, responding to personal emotions and collective concerns. The typography became both a shared diary and a fragmented cartography of our spatial anxieties: escalators and stairwells that expose us to the gaze of others, queues that collapse individuality into uniformity, and the omnipresence of cameras, from CCTV to phone lenses, that record and scrutinize without consent.
In my own contribution, I drew inspiration from the sensation of being seen, mis-seen, or unseen in public. The project reflected my ongoing questions around social anxiety, surveillance, and the tension between belonging and isolation in the crowd. Public spaces embody a paradox: they are wholesome infrastructures that enable connection and movement, yet they carry an undercurrent of dread, magnifying our vulnerabilities.
The work, situated in a gallery context, turns typography into a site of collective introspection. By translating fear into form, Who’s Afraid of Public Spaces probes the complex emotional architectures that define how we navigate, endure, and reimagine the spaces we share.
诞生于疫情时期，当“公共”本身成为令人不安的词。作为项目发起与主导者，我邀请一群设计师同行，共同思考：当我们走入街道、阶梯与车站时，是什么让我们感到被注视、被吞没、又渴望被看见？
在我主持的线上工作坊中，每位参与者以自身的恐惧与眷恋，绘制出“Public Spaces”的一个字母——这些字母汇聚成一套颤动的字体系统，既像群体的情绪日记，又像焦虑的建筑图纸。
对我而言，作品源自“凝视”与“自我”的张力：摄像头的无声注视、玻璃的反射、人群的编舞。公共空间既是舞台，也是目击者——它让我们在匿名与暴露之间摇摆。
当恐惧与迷恋并存，设计是否能成为一种同理的语言？一种揭示我们在公共中所畏惧的，也同时是我们最渴望归属的语言？
a. personal investigation on lettering and concepts
b. Personal typographic experiment
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