DigitalCraft Wiki:Infra-Ordinary
Group
Project Group
Pip Passchier & Leontien van Hattem
Starting Point
During class we read a piece of the book 'An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris' from Georges Perec. This artist went to sit down at a cafe in Paris in 1974 and wrote down what he saw. The ordinary daily things coming by. The question that was asked for this project was: will this still be able today? With all the digital divices that are now ordinary daily things in our life.
Design Research
Pip and I are both persons who are not very busy with our phone or other digital divices. Therefore we took a look at the world and people around us, in the public space. It was shocking how everyone looked down all the time, and did not even have notice of the small, funny and beautiful things that happened around them. We felt that we could make a difference here by capturing the 'little things in life', where everyone is so easy and silly about, but the actually no one sees it anymore.
We choose a typewriter and polaroid camera to capture this, because these two mediums are 'slow' nowadays which makes sure that you will be very busy with really looking at your surroundings before capturing it. This is in total contrast with how we use our camera and phone today, where we take 10 pictures of everything and write little messages without actual meaning sometimes.
Design Proces
Next step
From our findings we created a publication. A book full of poems and polaroid pictures. The ordinary daily life summed up in our own words. The reactions were very nice. People were surprises by our writing and did not even think about the things that we wrote down. In the end this was a very helpful way of researching, and a good starting point for this project. From here we came up with the idea to do something with the amount of typing that we do nowadays. Because we experienced that it takes a lot of time with the typewriter during our research, but actually we type the whole day long nowadays but it is designed so well now that you don't realize anymore that it is actually a action that might take some time.
And that is why we started to collect everything we type on one day in our phone. In Whatsapp. Because that is the app we both use the most. We collected this, and we wrote and typed it out. To feel again how much we actually write on one single day.
While doing this, we came up with an idea for the final design. We found it very interesting that typing goes so fast, and writing so slow, while actually you have the same result. Back in the old days the had nothing else than pen and paper, but now we are all used to the typing on our digital divices But what if typing will take the time that it does by handwriting. Then it is still the same action, but the time from the actual action. With this idea we want to make a statement. That we must not forget that almost everything digital and superfast nowadays is inspired on something from way back. And that we should not forget how precious this is. So that we should sometime think a little bit longer before we send just random messages. Because now the message is actually sometimes lost.
