If you are looking for an answer for something, a hint, or that the cosmos will decide things for you, you are in the right place. This blog and this post in particular. You can try to find your answer in the cards below, just click on one and see what it says.
The dice man is a book that tells the story of a New York psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions based only on the roll of a dice. He can’t change the dice’s decisions, including decisions about sex, murder, rape, and more.
This is your dice.
If the cards are not enough, you can start browsing the blog looking for a hint for life or an answer, using the overwhelming amount of posts the blog has to offer and using the randomness surfing that is possible here. But you need a method, you can use mine:
First post I choose randomly, then I scrolled down until the post ends, if something caught my eye or my mind, I lingered, wrote some notes, seldom made a screenshot. Then, I clicked on a left purple tag that is located on the same line as the end of the post (the grey tagging section). I had some choice between 2-6 tags, depends on how big the grey tagging section was. And then I continued to the next post, scrolled down, chose a tag one the left that is exactly at the end of the post, and so on.
The amount of time you should do it is as the number that is on your card, or until you find your perfect hint.
It helped me to discover all the interesting moments in the structure of the web page and to divide the webpage into different layers.
I chose that page (https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/?p=77833) and started to draw the structure of it. I noticed that this page doesn’t have a lot of air between different parts of information, words, and texts and all data ranged to the center. Moreover, there are six colors, 4 fonds and two main pictures with bright and sharps form inside. All paragraphs are left-aligned and they end in a rather chaotic order. However, squares around words help to divide information between each other. The quantity of the colors attract the biggest part of our attention and we can feel a little lost.
Sketch
Modular grid
The fullness of the page
The Hierarchy of the given information
Colors
Example of a new Design
By doing a new design for the existing page I tried to pay attention to the pictures and elements on the images which always can become the part of the website. In that case, I chose circles as the decoration of the page. Also, I wanted to divide the main text (essay) from the surrounding data. So color gave me a possibility for doing that. Plus I added a little bit more space between words and made distance between tags, title, essay. It helps us to get a breath.
According to a survey conducted by Brafton, the average session duration was 2 minutes, 17 seconds, but that varied depending on whether the site was B2B, B2C or a hybrid. And when it comes to blogs the nearly 8 out of 10 visitors are going to bounce after just viewing the first page. The average time spend on blogs are on only 1 minute, and 20 seconds, which is almost half the average time on sites. So it is very important to do everything in your power to make a strong impression and provide call to actions to keep them engaged. So how do we get people to stay a little longer on this blog.
We could make a fake “50 year celebration full scholarship” for the new students? Or Some kind of clickbait title? Something that would want you to stay, but also shows you what design blog is all about. Something that makes us able to pass the 1 minute, and 20 seconds average. Because this is not an average blog. This is a Designblog for the people. A visionary blog that inspire and moves young designers to greatness. So please don’t go! Just stay a little bit longer.
Try to go to categories. Here you find the different design fields. Or maybe search under “colour” there is a lot of great posts about colour and stuff. Please stay. Just a little bit longer. The design blog has a lot to offer. Don’t leave. There is also funny stuff in here too. Look at these monkeys. Hahaha.
PLEASE DON’T GO! A little longer. Please. Don’t go. Do you like books?
There is a lot of books to look at too. Is 1 minute, and 25 seconds too much to ask for? What more important things do you have to do? You are already here.
Go to the tag and look for something you like. There must be something! Porn? Or puppets? Please stay. Don’t leave.
Feeling over-saturated by images is something that everyone seems to experience and acknowledge but few choose to address. When being confronted with a new image, it is difficult to distinguish how it strikes you inside, if it strikes you at all. Having the access to infinite images and being used to face images you didn’t even agree to see, as well as having to process so many images daily is a process that eventually numbs one’s sense of perception. Over-stimulation leading to a loss of sensibility and impressionability. Extreme images of war or violence are perceived to have the same “weight” as an image of something mundane. Through images, we have had the opportunity to see nearly everything you can imagine. It seems the numbness and muted responses to visual stimuli developed as a coping mechanism to protect oneself from images. People are naturally impressionable and receptive to visual stimuli that can trigger emotions or actions. On a primal level, that is how we understand our surroundings. We are faced with events or visual qualities that we react to — this nearly automatic and intuitive reaction then enables one to better understand their surroundings and how to navigate them.
A world over-saturated by images makes seeing no longer important when everything has been seen. It turns blind those who could previously see. It’s a paradox that as we have gotten increasingly desensitized, our society still revolves around the act of seeing and considers sight to be the most important sense, creating a hierarchy of senses where seeing is the most valued. Images depicting a drastic range of content all have a different weight, depending on the relevance/extremity of the content. This glitch in perception is specifically enforced by images because of their two dimensionality. This quality allows them to be endlessly distributed and circulated, especially on the internet where it is free to do so. Digital images circulate extremely quickly and reach a much broader audience than printed ones do, and it seems this coping mechanism of numbness developed as a reaction to our increased use of technology. On a screen, you can scroll and encounter hundreds of images in close proximity to each other in a matter of minutes. The over-abundance and unlimited access to endless images lowers the value of each image. No image is truly valuable anymore because there are too many, one cannot give undivided attention to every single image they encounter, nor do they want to because everything has already been seen, and it feels that nothing is ever “new” or exciting. Images become interchangeable and meaningless, everything becomes everything, anything can be anything.
A single image, when payed attention to, conveys countless narratives and meanings and is open to a range of interpretations depending on who the viewer is, but with the notion of over-saturation, paying attention to and absorbing the meaning of a single independent image shows itself to be quite a task. When viewed in relation to another image, one that in one way or another conjures a similar feeling, visuality, or dialogue, the context and content of each extend out of the individual image and create a wider dialogue, one that makes underlying connections and systems of universality more apparent. When images are visually similar in terms of form, arrangement, and color, even if the literal content or subject is completely different, the viewer recognizes some form of universality and interchangeability. Even when visual similarities are not present, it is always possible to form connections and new understandings through their juxtaposition. It does reinforce the idea that everything is everything, and anything can be anything, and that no content is absolute or meaningful on it’s own, but when paired with a single other image, I recognize it to be relevant to enhance a deeper understanding of certain content, and it plays exactly in the terms of what I was pointing out earlier, meaninglessness and loss of attention and value. The viewer then has two points of reference, contrasting histories and content, which I believe stimulates them to realize that indeed, images are communicative tools, but they can only fully realize that potential when they are in relation to one another. In daily life, nothing is seen or experienced singularly in isolation from other things. Perception and understanding results from an interconnected processing of stimuli through a web of the physical senses, one sense and stimuli feeds the other and together, things can be understood.
When I began to write this short essay, I had a critical view of our desensitization to content, and I still do, but as I wrote this I began to realize that we do indeed understand and perceive through inter-relation of content. We cannot prevent being constantly bombarded by images in daily life, as well as on the internet — it is no surprise that we have developed “coping” mechanisms to prevent ourselves from being completely overwhelmed by external influences. Instead of surrendering to this inevitable numbness and passively allowing these coping mechanisms to grow, one could slightly redefine the act of seeing and perceiving images by paying attention to the connections that can be made between all images. As I paired images to highlight the interconnection, universality, and interchangeability of everything, I was astounded by how no matter how slight a similarity or link between two images is, it is possible to see underlying systems of life and matter — which we consistently deny…
I browsed in the blog, partly floating, partly with full attention. I moved in the world of the blog through the tags on the left. I had a method: First post I choose randomly, then I scrolled down until the post ends, if something caught my eye or my mind, I lingered, wrote some notes, seldom made a screenshot. Then, I clicked on a left purple tag that is located on the same line as the end of the post (the grey tagging section). I had some choice between 2-6 tags, depends on how big the grey tagging section was.
The first post was in Dutch, so the visualization was the only thing I had.
Grey Hypocrisy felt like it was made for me, the first hint, “quest for the dull”, he said. With an image of a room, with a personless solitary chair. These kind of rooms and chairs I’m trying to portray for a while.
5 years ago, Marlies wrote about Imme van der Haak . She reminded me of Yocheved Weinfeld, Yocheved Weinfeld, and her artworks in the 70’s.
“why?”> ON QUESTIONING > “wrong side”
I encountered a post that was written on my birthday, and then a post that was written on my mother’s birthday. It’s gotta be a sign! I found myself looking for hints, not sure for what.
Keep scrolling.
“warning” > “Ability to choose” >
“waiting”! “For the next to come along.”
More and more hints. Like these sentences are designed for me. I realized that I’m browsing like I could wander the streets as a small girl: not being a “believing person” but to believe in traffic lights. wherever there is a green light is the way I should go, it’s the right way for me, no space for free choice, it’s from above. From the god of traffic lights.
> “waiting to be found” > chairs!
“Death”> “yellow and tiny”>
I agreed with Rosa Doornenbal, she wrote some nice stuff. I started to decide for me, what is a metaphor in this infinite data. To find the metaphors.
Marie Knudsen wrote about a jewelry book about joints. Extract from the book: ”A joint is a place where two or more parts are united or made to fit together.”– is this about silver or people? she asks herself.
for me, it was About putting stuff out of context on purpose. To give things meaning by taking their context away. It’s about the movement between the details and being far from the details until its abstract.
“alive”>”alienation”>”abstract”>”time”>”enjoying”>”no time”>”absence”>”all sort of apes”>”allegorical”>”queue”
brows like you are looking for a quate. Saw a quaote of Walter Benjamin: “Beauty is not the object and not the shell, but the object in its shell.” Ok. Maybe another day it will mean something, keep it.
“I would like to bring your attention to noticing things.” I think it’s funny.
Walking with a Line was beautiful. Made it clear for me that sometimes the combination of things punctuate your heart. The context is important. Context is everything. to put things out of context means just putting it in a new context, in order to look at them beautifully.
look at this together! It’s so different then as two solitary pictures.
And this also, it does something only together, when isolated it’s almost nothing.
If you are looking for an answer for something, a hint, or that the cosmos will decide things for you, you are in the right place. This blog and this post in particular. You can try to find your answer in the cards below, just click on one and see what it says.
The dice man is a book that tells the story of a New York psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions based only on the roll of a dice. He can’t change the dice’s decisions, including decisions about sex, murder, rape, and more.
This is your dice.
If the cards are not enough, you can start browsing the blog looking for a hint for life or an answer, using the overwhelming amount of posts the blog has to offer and using the randomness surfing that is possible here. But you need a method, you can use mine:
First post I choose randomly, then I scrolled down until the post ends, if something caught my eye or my mind, I lingered, wrote some notes, seldom made a screenshot. Then, I clicked on a left purple tag that is located on the same line as the end of the post (the grey tagging section). I had some choice between 2-6 tags, depends on how big the grey tagging section was. And then I continued to the next post, scrolled down, chose a tag one the left that is exactly at the end of the post, and so on.
The amount of time you should do it is as the number that is on your card, or until you find your perfect hint.
While browsing through design blog, the first thing I did was scrolling down to see how many tags there are.
The scrolling felt everlasting, at one point I thought maybe the tags will never stop. They did stop at a certain point when I realized that if there where an infinite number of tags, the Designblog would became infinite itself.
This infinity intrigued me, because I cannot and will never be able to fully understand it. The endlessness dawned on me even more when I noticed the clear edge between articles and emptiness, two different dimensions. For me these dimensions worked the same as Earth and Space.
Earth has limits and the Universe has not (as far as we humans know). The first dimension “Earth” begins at the top of the blog and seems organized, there Is a clear layout, the highlights have a limit of 10 and the articles have a limit of 25. After scrolling down these 25 articles “Space”, the other dimension, begins. This dimension is infinite and after you crossed the edge where the articles stop, the tags could go on forever…
The “Space” dimension is also more chaotic because of the tag system that changes the order when the page gets refreshed. There are three outcomes, tags in order from A to Z, tags in order from Z to A and tags in a random order. Every time you go to another page or refresh the existing one, you don’t know how the tags will be ordered. Because of this I noticed a section of tags with numbers and symbols I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. This section is separated from the alphabetized tag-list and unlike them these tags don’t seem to be arranged in a logical order. This makes them seem unimportant to me and some of the tags are not something logical you would use while searching. For example:
The tag which made me question the most was: _.’’._/_)..
The page this tag sends me to tells about a graduation book made by Marion Molle with has these symbols as a title. She told the writer of the article that while making the book she felt obliged to add text but she didn’t want to, so instead she used the symbols as title.
The core of the endlessness of this blog is for me the edge where the articles stop, and the tags continue infinitely. The tag _.’’._/_).. became my starting point of visualizing this.
I scrolled down to the “edge” of the articles and noted the tag that comes after the grey block. Then I clicked on this tag and continued this way of collecting tags a couple of times.
When I reached the tag Åbäke I stopped and checked my browse-history list.
This ‘Åbake’ tag is the first word in the alphabetical list and felt like a good closure. The words I collected were in the following order:
Because these tags only exist in the virtual world, i wanted to bring them into the real world by materializing them. I wanted to approach this with a personal view, so I chose to look at it from a Jewellery Department perspective because i would like to go there next year. I made earrings with the tag words in the same colour and typeface as Designblog. To show my path trough the tags and pages, I made a .gif of the tag word earrings going through my ears in the same order as my browse history. Like clicking on one tag and going to another, not knowing which tag comes next. The tag words I ended up with are not something I would normally click on, this made me see pages I otherwise would have never seen. Because of this research I now know that Åbäke is a London-based collective of four graphic designers.
It doesn’t make sense to end a post about endlessness right?
So this is not the end!
Try it yourself, click on Read the rest of this entry » scroll down to the edge where the ‘space’ dimension starts, click on any tag you find there and see where it brings you.
_________________________________________________________________ (more…)
It’s like entering a never-ending tunnel.
I step in and I am lost.
I step in and I see such an excessive amount of possibilities that it becomes overwhelming.
It is extremely vast but there is only one right way.
After a long, long search when I find it, a bright light illuminates my path.
Suddenly, I understand everything, I am sure of my moves, I know how to continue.
A pair of pink ballet shoes shines in the dark and show me a new entrance, but inside I am still blinded and confused. Quickly I realize the pink slippers help me to adapt my body to the space and guide me towards the next opening.
I still cannot see clearly, but I feel. I feel smooth silk, tickling wool, rough cotton all around the wall. Am I in a costume shop? I choose a piece with a tulle fabric resembling a Ballet costume. I wonder, am I in Jaime Hayon’s house? Is this black hole that I am trapped in an art piece or the pieces inside are a creations in itself?
I am about to give up when a new light appears. It is a search engine and I type in « email ». Nothing fits me, I cannot find what I am looking for. So I try « futuristic ». And to my greatest delight a new gate opens.
The relief doesn’t last long. My body starts to tremble, I am dizzy and an echo is repeating the words « social » and « design », « social-design ». If that weren’t enough, guilt and uneasiness take over my body. I rewind my previous steps to find out what has changed. I have a new clothing piece! I ask myself: What is Vetements doing in fashion industry? And I quickly take it off. That’s when a new entrance, saying Jacob Jensen appeares.
However, when I enter, nothing looks like him. So I look for a multiplayer. I cannot find anyone, only a chess set. So I step in the role of a knight and find myself in the next cave: a library from the Middle Ages full of old books. Pick a goddamn book, I am told. Only if it were so simple. This choice will define my entire future, the new world I will discover. Quartz obsidian, how does it sound? I visualize a bright, colorful space to put an end to this darkness. Luckily, I wasn’t wrong. My new world constitutes a Responsive Color System.
Although this brightness is liberating at first, it blinds my senses. So I have to search again. The result is unspeakable. I cannot recognize my visual system anymore. I enter a world full of code names. It takes me a considerable time to figure out only the name of my new Earth: CIE-1931-System. It is hard because in that world I am only an x, a tiny, dull, lifeless particle of the system. Almost the youngest.
I am lost again, swimming in the fog. I am desperate to find a safe place, when a new concept is introduced to me: The Exform by Nicolas Bouriaud. I dive into this new opportunity with the hope of finally finding clarity.
As I open up Designblog, the first thing that caught my eye and took all the attention were the yellow highlights. I almost got annoyed, that my focus wasn’t even on the title. I don’t think my focus is that easy to distract but maybe, who knows. At first I didn’t wanted to choose a focus subject yet, so I decided just to surf around on the blog. Some of the posts I found interesting others not.
But I still couldn’t not escape being aware of the yellow highlights every time I arrived at a new post. The highlights were very different in the way of the use of them. Some of the posts had a lot of highlighted words, some had a small text highlighted and some only had a very few. So I went on surfing on the blog with this in my mind until something strange happened.
I came across a post, where something was different. It didn’t had any highlights at all (except for the ones in the bottom, they all have). I felt somehow confused and relieved. I made it to the end of my journey on the design blog. I hit a wall. Just a clean post about “Doing aerobics before painting?: What can we expect during the Basic year”.
I followed the different yellow highlight to the end and I wanted to do something with the placement of them, the shapes and lengths. That was one of the nice thing with them, they changes and had a nice random flow.
So I decided that I wanted to work with them only. So I screenshot a lot of the different post on the Designblog. So I could have a nice “library” for the highlights. From there I started working on how to visualize it. Because it was such a simple gesture they made, but were quite strong, I wanted to make it as a very clean piece.
So what is a highlight, why do we use it and how do we use it?
Highlights works as you might know to make one specific word or sentence stronger. In some cases you underline your point for example. They are KEYWORDS in your text. The most important words to sum up your text. It is there to show the importance and your valid point in your text.
As Wikipedia also says: Highlight adds translucent color to a paper or text to emphasize particular parts of the text. The highlight can be seen in different displays as colors, fonts, depending the meaning of the context. You can also use the highlight to confuse the reader by putting them places where it is out of context. So in a way, it is a very simple but strong tool.
So as I said before I wanted to do a simple visualizing of the highlights. In the blog the highlights are colored yellow, it could also have been blue, green, different fonts etc. But my idea was neither of these. I thought that another way to make something pop out of the context could be levels. Levels in that sense that you don’t adjust anything else that the level or height of the highlights.
Imagine that you read a book, suddenly one of the words is in another level that the others. You would notice that in the same way as a “regular” highlighting as color. I’m not saying it is a more clever way to do it. Especially not in a book (it would be unpractical, so unless that is the case. I wouldn’t recommend it) but for something else than that it has the same effect. So I wanted to make a board, where I took some of the highlights I printed from the blog, and visualized it on that. Where everything is the same color and same font (in this case no fonts at all) where the only different is the level of the surface. I placed my “higher levels” as the highlights from the blog I had screenshotted earlier.
The result is very minimalist, but I think it sums up the thoughts I have been dealing with, while doing this assignment or exploring. The levels of course also works because of the shadows. And I think they work stronger, the more shadow and light they have. It is actually also the only highlight you can feel, unless we make a new highlighting with materials instead. That could be interesting too..
Searching here on the Designblog I tried to find something about my home country, Brazil. I did research about it but found very little significant posts, one mention over here another one over there. Tried something about my hometown Goiânia but there were no results at all. My wish is that in the future a student from my area bump with some content about us in here and get surprised.
So here I’m going talk about housing in the area I come from, Goiânia, more specifically about construction, I think it’s a good starting point to build some content I would like to see in here too and it also goes along with what I’ve been researching through drawing.
A FOREIGN IN MY OWN PLACE
Living here in the Netherlands for almost 2 years already without coming back to Brazil really sparkle something about my hometown inside my brain. I like to remember about how the landscape looks like, cause it’s just so different from everything I see here, then suddenly I start rediscovering the place where I come from.
Compared to Holland or Amsterdam everything is more precarious, Brazil and the majority of people doesn’t have the same economic background that Holland has, the material situation is much different, what shapes and sculpt the land in a totally different way.
There was a initial city plan that started to be followed but because of many factors people themselves started to change the surrounding the way they could.
Living on a foreign country makes you be able to see with fresh eyes the place where you come from. My family never really traveled around so despite the images that I would see in movies, television or internet everything I would see was Goiânia, Goiânia and Goiânia. I never realised how come the place was so embed visually inside my brain. It came for me very strong recently, everything I would always see but take it for granted, it came back now for me as such a powerful visual source of inspiration.
1. HUMAN FORCE
Construction work is normally made by man in Goiânia. It can be normal that the owner also works with the bricklayers and workers. My dad did help to build our house and others too, I remember that my neighbor too, it’s funny because in my dad’s house some of the walls are not so straight and there are always some sort of imperfections around. It’s also possible to build the house in the way you want, there are some protocols to follow but very little people follow it.
The human force can be found everywhere, there are many people working in the service sector in Brazil. It’s also very normal that a lot of jobs happens out of formality, so many times there is no contract or third parties behind the bricklayer and who is paying for the house to be build.
MAKING SHELTER
It can be pretty common that man work without necessary protection in constructions. Jaime was our home-keeping for a long time, and I remember when he did fall from a scaffolding during some work he was doing in my house. He was not specialized on that kind of service at all, he lost some nails in the fall, but he was fine.
Not only people can fall but houses that are build downhill can also fall and get destroyed, that happens often in some areas.
2. MATERIALITY
6 HOLES BRICKS
It’s the most used kind of bricks the 6 holes bricks as my dad says on the video above. I find it quite pretty, they are made out of clay and have a beautiful orange. The sun also make it shine when it’s pretty new.
It’s normal that families start constructions and sometimes the money is over but the house not. You can see many properties with unfinished houses and some material left. These days for me they look like beautiful contemporary sculptures. Symbol of something for the future. Makes me think about some of my plans and goals, the ones that if they were a house, they would be like this sculptures right now. Why did this action was stoped? Is the family taking care that the work continues? What are they dreams and visualisations for when the sculpture it’s done?
UNDESIREBLE BELLYS
Protection is necessary. Against the weather, non wanted looks and also from non invited people and it’s many non wanted actions. My grandmother lived in Urias Magalhães and she had pieces of broken glass on the top of her walls. The pieces were out of green glass and had a pretty colour, even though it did look quite frightening.
“Grandma, why are there pieces of broken glass on the top of your wall?”
“This is to cut the thief’s belly’s”
3 . GRAVITY
THE LAST FACTOR
Gravity is an important law of physics, every act or move we do is subjugated by the laws of gravity, we are subordinated by it all the time, so wouldn’t be the case that constructions are out of nature laws.
One important part of a construction that also strikes me visually are water tanks. It’s something necessary once many neighborhoods don’t have sewage treatment sometimes. Water tanks have normally a wonderful blue that goes along with intense blue skies too. It can be normal in some areas to bring water fresh from the ground. It’s also normal that you dig holes and take a look if there is in your area some fresh water, then you are lucky!
I did drink water fresh from the ground my whole life and I prefer it’s taste then the water in Holland. Anyways, socially it’s more interesting that every single house has drinkable tap water available like Holland. In Brasil many people can’t drink water from the tap because it’s not healthy to do it on longterm, it has also a weird taste.
Some Brazilians living abroad are so culturally used to not drink water from the tap that even in countries like Holland they still buy water from bottles.
IT’S NECESSARY TO REST
Hammocks were items designed by indigenous people in Brazil to sleep, rest, relax or even to see the time passing. It’s still a highly used item nowadays between Brazilians that normally put it in their porches. It’s not so used to sleep at night by most of the people but it is for naps in the afternoon after a huge almoço on a Sunday, together with the family, that’s a moment that hammocks are quite disputed, for example.
Even though people don’t sleep so much at night on it, the acupuncturist I used to attend told me that many back problems I was having by that time could be solved having a hammock in the room instead of a bed and mattress, he had one himself.
“To work is good but to rest after it’s even better”
I don’t really know the way, but I want to. I have this habit to wander off randomly when I’m unknown with a place. Just to see where I’ll end up if I let go of control. “Let fate decide” says the romantic in me.
After a while I see patterns and I believe that I know where I am. Finding attractive by-streets in every corner. But that’s an illusion. By the next turn this pattern is shattered by reality.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I don’t want to stay. Just keep going, till this frame turns into bedlam. Borders can’t contain me anymore. Looking back I can’t trace back my origins. I’m not lost. I’m new here.
Living in the 21st-century ‘internet‘ has become a big part of life where it is inevitable. With the help of the internet, humans were able to achieve a lot of accomplishments. Looking at the experiences that I personally use the internet so-called ‘surfing’, I encounter with so many random information, and the randomness that leads to different randomness gives surprises and joy of knowing and not knowing at the same time. There are many choices that we can make and at the same time even with definite choices on the internet you never know what you bump into. Just like the times we spend on google or youtube. It goes similar to the design blog, there are archives of the basic year students and Rietveld academie with a lot of projects and archives from 2007.
In the blog itself, there are so many clicks or icons that lead you to so many different destinations. The changes in the cursor and the icon changes may distract you or guide you to almost infinite time and loop in the designblog itself. When everything is a possibility and knowing the fact of encountering different experiences and the randomness, having a perspective may give you slight changes in the times on the blog. Like the internet that we use and the deep web, they both exist but it’s just the way we approach the internet.
When spending time on clicking and facing different pages on the web, you will notice that the links provided on the blog may not always lead you to the web you imagine. Some may be missing the links and the websites may have changed over time and won’t lead to the exact place as the writer of the post.
First posts starting from 2007, I thought it would be interesting to see how the web would be like, and look at the posts from the exact time when the posts were published. Just like a ‘time-machine’ what was it like in the past? The web and the internet changes a lot and we only face the recent and modified versions, the majority of the websites are updated to the latest version. Thus, we only see the brand new versions and changes. However, with the help of the internet archive service website called ‘wayback machine‘ you can go back into the times where the posts were first published and can see how the blog was like back in the past. The experience of wayback machine web to the past and browsing through the blog gives you a totally different time. The websites leading out of the blog has a different design and directs you to the exact place the links were first made to. The service guides you to the past to see the old versions of the blog and fixes most of the missing links.
The experience with the wayback machine was like looking at books in the library. For example at a library when you choose a book and read, the design, context, and the information are the same as the date when it was first published. Thus, looking at a book can be seen as taking a time machine and experiencing the past. On the other hand, the Internet gives creators the ability to change and update information directly and instantly, and thus it’s hard for the users to notice or remember how the web was like in the past. The web pages are always changed and updated to something new. Since the design blog functions as an archive of the rietveld students like a library, the use of the wayback machine can make you feel the experiences you have at a library, by positioning yourself back to the time the post was published and see how what it was actually like.
Even with the same act of browsing the same website, a slight twist in looking from the past can give a whole new experience and the way of seeing things, like the game spot the differences.
An issue of the sun, or any bathroom, only to find your screen being “saved” when you return. It grabs your attention, you might ask yourself.
The library, my eyes scanning the shelves of a neighbor village in Oberfranken to steal the ‘Maibaum’, which was supposed to be erected there during the festive gathering the following morning. It drawn me to it. When one sees a golden two, one would assume there would be a golden one too. Hesitating to grab a book, I kept strolling through. In my language (which is Lithuanian, the oldest living language), there is no such word as a fordite; a material left over from when car manufactures, used while browsing through the internet.
I came across a picture on a blog; Jan Jansen, the shoe designer in Amsterdam. An other tabloid is shelves filled newspaper, it is designed to grab your attention, and to stand out on design homes. My eyes fell on a piece of pottery by an English artist. Most living spaces use textiles as membranes and interfaces.
Instantly. 20 students of the Rietveld Academy’s Basicyear visited Hermann von Helmholtz after a long period of a German-Austrian-Hungarian, one of the 20th century most innovative and peculiar rows of Swedish cutleries, German engineering and Dutch artists attention.
The Fordite had walked around the nail polish stand. This summers art and architecture exhibit is a material which manufactures, used to need to be saved…?
Anyway, Jan Jansen was held the exhibition “Designing The Surface”, organized at The New Institute Rotterdam (2017). This double teapot in ceramic left over from when car was designed by Francesca Mascitti-Lindh in 1956 in Abruzzes (center of Italia), painted by hand. Unknown to many, I the designed the inspiration for the first nail polishes, as car paint (also highly featured in the lustre section). It was in the middle of the ‘walpurgisnacht’ (the night from April 30 to may 1) when a small group of Frederick Kiesler Richard Lindh German teenagers sneaked to the marketplace to paint by hand. -Sofia design week
The lustre was quickly drawn to the textile area were a lot of Sofia Bulgaria was shown. Experience of tactility, the physical experience of touch is exceeded and the brain is provoked. How does it work?
Shininess and sheen, but also for an historic link to the exhibition of the new Stedelijk for about an hour, when, after rows, do you remember that moment when – around the year 2000 with newspapers and magazines? Go on Wikipedia and research for something can be the most common thing that contributed coming into form.
Does my screen this kettle and sparkle? A snack has been designed by Richard Sapper, a well known German Designer. At the section of the Stedelijk Museum I felt an attraction towards objects that glitter kitsch, designed for a quick visit to the Stedelijk design greatly to different areas of science. A strong effect can be produced with simple actions. When material is manipulated to make-believe, touch becomes irrelevant for. Hello there dear reader, –why the fleuron.
By browsing through design blog I decided to only follow the tags in which I am interested and are making good promises based on their name. Also, I decided to follow the tags quickly without going deeper in the reading but having an eye on that it still feels like a clear amount as I planned to go back later and read deeper in the essays. With that technique I created my own little library around 30 tags to come back to without feeling overwhelmed by all the essays I could read while visiting design blog. As my search got really specific at some points and I wrote down every tag I followed I can easily recreate my search which shows that design blog search stays steady through the tags if you know where to go. My search started with the aesthetic tag. After looking back on my search timeline it made really much sense. Everything was connected somehow and was laying most of the times in my interest.
In the beginning I was browsing through the architecture category followed by blank spaces and minimalism. Fast it became more specific as about light and surface. Coming from surface I found myself in the graphic design section about covers, book design and color questions. It became to be about Illusions and fake appearances and going back to architecture and more specific about glass.
Being at the same page again from the beginning I decided to go this time into the product design tag. It became about school furniture design and exhibitions.
Then coming to the really broad ‘art’ tag I ended up in physical exercises meaning to enter the world of theater. From theater I decided to follow the naked tag which leaded me to invisible fashion, minding material and wearable technology and going back to craft again. Here I followed my last tag form follows function which connected to product design again.
So after analyzing my design blog browsing I can connect the essays I looked at to different main content sections of design.
Architecture
Graphic Design
Product Design
Theater
Fashion Design are making up the more really brought topics I was browsing through.
By following really clear lines while browsing I was hoping not to loose track and moving in between the topics I like. This worked out really good but almost too good. Often I ended up with the same essay or got such specific tags that only one essay was left fitting. Still, for me to stay still in logical order it was the best experience. Maybe I was only disappointed in this search engine/system because, even if it was not my expected goal, the amount of essays would destroy my focused searching.In the end it just showed me that there is sense behind the pages. Therefore I think it is a really good broad way of dealing with subjects one is really interested in. Make sure you know what you are searching for otherwise the design blog can suck you up. I am reasoning that even if I followed the tags I was interested in, Designblog was leading me through different sections of design. When I started to go deeper in the architecture category I didn’t expect to end my search finding essays about wearable technology. Which means it leaded me towards unexpected topics but still they were based on my decisions and therefore interest.
The whole idea of connections and following tags in between the essays reminded me of the domino effect or a network of laying domino stones. In fact I was only really in control by deciding on the very first tag. Eventually the overall image of the searching pattern became only clear after ending the search itself. Every domino stone represents a tag in my search and is a connecting point for the others and therefore a necessary part of where I come from and where I go. After clicking on the first page it becomes an aware automatism. Every mouse click follows the other as one stones falls into the next. click click click click …
The interesting point is the fact of the awareness. The Designblog works automatically if you decide on following the existing tags instead of choosing your specific topic every time again. Still that is activated by my own choice of tags I follow and that is what creates my own network in the blog. If I would have chosen other tags to follow or would have continue for several hours the whole structure would look different now. This is what makes the search unique and individually based.
The essays I followed were always connected through at least one tag. The tag I followed.
This is the same way I connected the domino stones.
The numbers of my search getting higher and higher referring to the feeling of building up layers of pages. When I followed my 15th page I ended up at the same page as my second one and the layers got mixed up. Still, the numbers are connecting the different topics.
Now when going back through my tags, to reread the essays I came across, I can go slowly back in the timeline,. One by one not destroying the connections of my whole searching structure but staying in the network I created.
I rely on science just like another person may rely on god like
a woman that cleans will not lose her morality
Or Hamlet, whose private conversation with his mother is overheard by Polonius, hiding behind the drapes
Blue means “deep, inner, supernatural, peaceful “Sinking towards black, it has the overtone of a mourning that is not human.” “typical heavenly color”, not being able to direct the final outcome of a project
the outcome can sometimes become quite exciting, bringing together recordings that are time wise very far away form each other
Of showing the change through time, by pushing a big squared formed ice block through the streets of …Mexico City
When is a sock a sock? a word is a room and a room is a word
We can always be slow in reference to something
which is faster. Get used to see the shoe on the other foot, get used to perceive slowness
Where did you hide the gun? It can be weeks before they are found, and by then, the bodies are in a state of decay
But sometimes you can find something that can be of use. But then I come across delightful sentences that have now regretfully almost disappeared from use, and instantly I am charmed again.
For me sound is something mysterious, because I’m deaf
I find myself in getting shallow answers and understanding of the material world around me..
Step six, keep it together
Some theories hold that cave paintings may have been a way of communicating with others
Some people prefer to wear black clothes while others feel them selfs most comfortable in white, empty spaces
…..It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
He tells that his girlfriend had a birthday party but didn’t had enough space to let all the guests sit, so in one day he made a table and extra chairs so all the guests had a place and a table to eat from
It gave the children the opportunity to explain themselves in a way, that haven’t been possible for the children before
Should we think about our plants and animals?
A poem created by putting together sentences found amongst the many existing writings, while browsing the 3000 texts on the blog. The copyrights belong to the auteurs, and to me.
The sensations stays with you long after you have exited the work and you feel a connection with everyone who have ’felt’ the work
But sometimes he gets criticized that he did not had a relation to the real world
I was thinking, writing about a chair can be really interesting but for me it had to be more than only writing about a chair
it seems like this chair just appeared to be. and it looks great.
I wonder how does it feel to sit on that chair
That same one that JØRGEN HØVELSKOV
Designed
The book gives us back that brave imagination of a child
A thing given willingly to someone without payment; a present
the dimension of pure existence, of the goodliness, of eternal and perfect beauty Well, in this century grooms usually don’t give their brides gifts like this
Despite its abnormal appearance this book is like many others of its kind held together by tape
The noise from the boots that hit the cold wet floor, yelling men shouting and cursing, fork lift trucks and pallets that hit the floor with a loud bang But the jury was also impressed by the content of the thesis
Though there’s definitely a shadow hanging over this book and it’s called realityHowever, the Mohawk tribe never actually wore the Mohawk hairstyle traditionally
If I was a nomad.. I would be a technomad
The golden thread gives me the feeling that it will hold forever…
as can be seen by the frequency it has been rented out in recent years by people with a similar curiousity and interest to mine
The exhibited artworks or the visitors walking carefully among them, observing them…
Everyone finds his or her own way of browsing through this blog. There are so many options to click on, which made me unsure where to start. I kept standing still on the blog, frozen on a single page, instead of moving through it. I wondered where do you start and where do I end? I almost got annoyed by the fact that the massive size of the blog was standing in my way, preventing me from looking at it. So I gave myself the assignment to browse through the blog randomly, within the time limit of ten minutes. After these ten minutes I asked myself: “what caught my eye the most?” What did really get stuck in my mind?
So there I went. I started at the base; clicking on the menu of the website. I kept clicking and clicking, without making a conscious decision about what I was clicking on. My most important goal was to make sure the page just kept reloading and changing. Slowly I begin to realize that I’m not even really reading the blog entries. Of course I don’t; I don’t even like reading… So I noticed that for me the most important thing is the visual appearance of the page. I’m interested in the way the shapes change and move when you click to go to the next page. I’m interested in the way the different colours are spread across the screen.
Time’s up. And I started reflecting on what I saw within these ten minutes. To be honest it was very comforting to just look at the constant changing of the page, which was the consequence of my constant clicking. There where two things that really caught my attention.
The first thing that grabbed me while looking at the blog where the colours.
If you leave out the white and look at the colours that remain, you get a combination of bright yellow, pink and orange/red, together with black.
These are colours that I often use in my own work. Especially the combination of the bright colours with the black is something I really like.
The second thing that grabbed me was that I clicked on a broken link. I clicked ‘subscribe’ in the left menu bar and it took me to a page that said it didn’t exist:
I felt like I found a little secret. This is in itself already nice, but it’s a secret that also pretends not to exist. I clicked a link and it took me to a page, but the page said the page does not exist. Which is of course a bit strange, how can I be on the page, if the page doesn’t exist?
These two things (the colours and the missing page) inspired me to create my own missing page. The one that is used now is funny, but does not really fit the style of the blog. I wanted to create a missing page that matches the blog. I tried to achieve this by using the colours from the blog. The image itself seems random, which it actually is. But this randomness fits in with the great diversity within the content that is present on the blog. The text that I added to the image is a reflection on the paradox that the page is there, but is also missing.
