Furniture design as a prototype model for skill development course for prisoner in Thailand

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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Reoffending in Thailand

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Thailand is facing prisoner overcrowded inside prisons. The main reason for this situation is that the released prisoners commit crimes again to return to prison on purpose because they can’t make their living after release. One of the strategies that the Ministry of Correction uses to address this challenge is to develop their skill while serving their custody. The prison provides various courses for prisoners to enroll from craftsmanship skills and Thai royal culinary to undergraduate studies. Most prisoners finish their studies before release, so the prisons encourage prisoners to create products to sell to make money they will receive after release. Despite the story and quality, the sale volume is not that high and has a very small profit margin. Moreover, prisoners are not willing to continue their studies and just live by the days waiting for release day.

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Craftsmanship in prison

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Prisoner in Thailand working on the chair

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The Bangkok Remand Prison offers a wide range of vocational training programs for prisoners, equipping them with skills in wood carpentry, metalsmithing, rattan crafts, pottery, and textiles. These programs are designed not only to provide rehabilitation but also to support economic reintegration post-release. The products crafted through these training courses are sold, with the earnings contributing to prisoners' settlement funds, helping them transition back into society with financial support.

Among these vocational outputs, furniture production accounts for 24% of the prison’s total product revenue, highlighting the significant role of woodworking and craftsmanship within the program. This creates an opportunity to enhance the value and visibility of prisoner-made furniture, integrating design innovation with rehabilitation efforts. By merging industrial production with traditional craftsmanship, this project seeks to explore how design can contribute to skill-building, economic empowerment, and social reintegration.

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Product from prisoners

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Despite the craftsmanship and effort invested in their work, prison-made furniture and products often struggle to align with current market trends, leading to lower sales and limited commercial appeal. One of the key challenges is that prisoners have little to no connection with the outside world, making it difficult for them to stay updated on design trends, consumer preferences, and evolving aesthetics. As a result, their designs often appear outdated, limiting their competitiveness in the marketplace.

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To better understand the workflow and constraints within the prison system, I conducted a task analysis to map out the production process inside the workshops. Given the rigid daily schedule, prisoners have only four hours per day allocated for vocational training and craftwork. This time restriction significantly prolongs the production cycle, making it difficult to efficiently complete products and meet market demands.

With limited work hours and a structured environment, the workflow is fragmented, causing delays in product development and limiting the ability to experiment with new designs or respond to market trends. This insight highlights the need for process optimization and design adaptation, ensuring that the products can be crafted more efficiently without compromising quality.

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Stakeholder mapping

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Inside the prison, the two main groups of people involved in the vocational training and production process are prisoners and prison officers. To efficiently manage workshops and product creation, they divide themselves into various roles, ensuring that tasks are distributed effectively across different craft disciplines.

Prisoners take on roles such as craftsmen, assistants, and quality controllers, depending on their skills and experience within the program. Some focus on carpentry, metalwork, or weaving, while others handle finishing touches, packaging, or basic administrative tasks related to workshop operations. However, due to the rigid structure of prison routines and limited opportunities for cross-training, these roles often remain fixed within single disciplines, limiting the potential for collaborative, multidisciplinary design approaches.

Prison officers, on the other hand, serve as supervisors and coordinators, ensuring that workshops operate smoothly within the constraints of prison regulations. They oversee schedules, material distribution, and security measures, playing a crucial role in maintaining order while facilitating prisoner participation in vocational training.

This structured role distribution is essential for managing production within the prison environment, but it also presents challenges, such as workflow inefficiencies, lack of skill-sharing, and limited cross-material collaboration. Addressing these issues could enhance product innovation, efficiency, and market competitiveness, ultimately improving the economic and rehabilitative impact of these programs.

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Another key challenge in the prison’s vocational training program is the separation of courses by material—woodwork, metalwork, rattan weaving, pottery, and textiles are all taught independently, with little to no crossover between disciplines. As a result, prisoners lack exposure to multidisciplinary skills, limiting their ability to experiment with material combinations or develop more complex, innovative designs.

This siloed approach creates a narrow skillset, restricting opportunities for prisoners to apply diverse craftsmanship techniques in their work. Without encouragement to explore other courses, they become confined to single-material production, which reduces the potential for higher-value, hybrid products that could appeal more to contemporary markets.

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Key Insights

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Paul P.

Furniture design as a prototype model for skill development course for prisoner in Thailand

Year

2019

Role

Design Student

Design at

KMITL

For

Ministry of Justice, Thailand

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