Regarding Project 1, I focused on the stereotypes of Thai advertisements and how they emphasize on the product being "imported" and "standard"; products are usually guaranteed by famous institutes via certificates or signatures from models to indicate high success rate and satisfaction of using the products, while, on the other hand, the ones guaranteeing the products may not be involved in the usage of the product at all. For example, the certificates may not be related to the category of the product, and the models may not be using the product themselves in contradiction to what they advertised for.
This implies that, while guarantees are supposed to reassure people from getting tricked into buying inefficient products, Thai companies actually take advantage of the guarantees themselves and use it to trick the local people instead.
The fixation of specifically buying imported products shows how Thai people are obsessed with the image they give to outsiders or guests, and by trying to reach that particular image and standard, they bought products which guaranteed them to do so. This is similar to how Thai people arrange their rooms to be at a standard level, to show others that they too are "standardized".
In relation to Project 1, Project 2 lays out the possibilities of customizing the Neufert “standard” rooms into a Thai standard one where the room is on display to guests and outsiders, and the real Thai usage arrangement where the rooms are customized for personal usage. This can be categorized further into “Functional Aggregation” where the dining room and living room are merged in usage, “Functional Pretension” where there are two living rooms, one for attending guests and the other for personal use, “Functional Augmentation” of the bedroom where the users no longer search for entertainment within the living room since a personal computer is installed within the room, including the reduction in the frequency of entering the kitchen area due to an installation of a compact refrigerator, and “Functional Adaptation” where the implementation of objects adjusts the surrounding factors to fit the installation of additional components such as how a curtain is placed to block the sunlight reflecting on the screen of a personal computer. The bedroom is no longer used only at night but during day time as well, since artificial light has replaced the usage of sunlight.
These are the Thai customization of standard rooms.
