Lucy and I start our unique journey of meeting virtually and completing everything by zoom.
We initially have a lot of ideas and topics that we like to try. The infographic is our starting point to connect all the ideas together. Beyond the infographic, we explore how symbols and shapes can play different roles to represent different meanings. We first began to brainstorm our ideas in mindmaps and collected artists and researched artists and their works that we got inspired by as well.
Then, we start to make our mindmap. We place emphasis on three different branches: social criticism, social dynamics, and learning in 2020. Those topics are closely related to our lives and somehow influence how we position our self into the world.
After that, we start to make our iterations by sending each other our idea. I did a lot of practice using hands-on activity, such as doing the photography, cutting the wire, and tiring the paper. Lucy did some interesting experimentation with symbol and shape by connecting them with an information system, such as how long she has been on phone during the COVID-19. During this process, Lucy and I did countless communication and Zoom meeting. Since we need to overcome the 15 hours time differences. Lucy is in Irvine, California and I am in Beijing, China. This is also how our book name comes from. Every week on our scheduled meeting day Lucy joins the meeting at 9 pm (GMT-7) and I join the meeting at 12 pm (GMT+8).
We play around with overlapping, juxtaposition, remaking the process. We have been enjoying this process of making things together and generate new designs as we work through.
The goal of making this book is to show a design practice that me and Lucy experimented with. We come together and develop our own pedagogy of cooperation and design. In the beginning, we come up with a lot of interesting topics that overlap each other. We decide to use infographic and conditional design as a bridge to connect our ideas together. As our practices evolve, we form our own language about collaboration and place emphasis on the process of making. From the collaboration side, we overcome the 15 hours time difference and communicate our idea through slack and zoom. I would never imagine that I can complete this project without Lucy. For the design side, we present our dialogue through visual representations. We intend to create such an open-ended series and let the audience come up with the conclusion on their own.
In the end, we also did a video to show the physical difference between me and Lucy throughout this project.
