As part of an ongoing research and development project we are building upon our work with the Design Products department at the RCA to explore and inventive new ideas for the scope and function of small books.

Electro-Interdependent-Books is a limited edition of 200 unique books – each book with the ability to transmit and receive ‘messages’ within a ‘community’ of individual books.

The project explores:
- the book as part of an event and as part of a performance;
- the book as an individual;
- the book as a an audio device (Electronic Whispering Objects);
- the potential for mediating the interrelationships between distinct individuals or groups of books within an edition in order to manipulate how they are interpreted.

In-progress, more info coming soon.

A while back we made a little website for our very talented friend Sarah Thomas:
www.sarahthomasinteriors.com

Sarah helped us design and kit out our studio in Dean Street. In her inimitable fashion she found us some great furniture and mixed this with some really nice new commissions. Shown here is Dean Street and her work for one of our other clients, Not To Scale, and some of her production work for sports brand Converse.

Design Products, Royal College of Art, Yearbooks designed from 2008 through to 2011. Each book is a pocket book packed full of information about the graduating student group and their work; the department and college information; and notes on exhibitions and staff.

We worked with the V&A and Wood McGrath to create a skeuomorphic ‘digital gift’ for the event ‘The Future Object’ which was convened to understand how ephemeral design objects created today (especially those from digital design practice) can be integrated into museum collections. The event looked at how this kind of work can be understood and viewed long after the digital platforms on/for which they were created have been superseded by new technologies.

We developed an interactive treasure trove with a skeuomorphic user interface that took its cues from the Microfiche reader still in use by the V&A archive today. This was delivered as a digital gift on a small USB data stick, with an oversize label that owed its form to the conventions laid down in the V&A’s archival process.

The project raises many questions about our collective memory for digital products and indeed if these ephemeral artefacts can ever be ‘archived’ using traditional methods. The digital gift now ironically sits in the archive at the V&A, suspended in a (seemingly) temporal space. Long live USB.

The meaning of words and of language cannot be extracted from this typographic relationship though. What you say in words is always more important than the shape of things. Words and language communicate position, attitude and spirit and should be considered carefully and in conjunction with typographic form. To imagine that the word c*nt in a nice font, means something other than the word c*nt, would be foolish.

Shown here is the Pop-In-Paper that we designed for the bStore, in conjunction with Paul Smith, for the Pop-Up-Shop in Selfridges. Attitude and positioning were expressed through language and typographic form in equal measure. Editorial and creative direction Jason Hughes, edited by Dal Chodha.

The benefits of digital technologies are often thought to lie in their replicability, in the potential for fast, cheap and consistent production and dissemination.This need not necessarily be the case, the low level access offered by the raw digital material, code, has the ability to open up multiple avenues of variation and uniqueness.

As a template, code has the distinct ability to shift itself before each use, before producing its outcome. This may be in response to its own state, its previous output or external information of any kind and provides the capability for the production of a series of unique outputs from a single beginning. Written Images, a project by Martin Fuchs and Peter Bichsel, illustrates this by producing a run of art books, each generated uniquely before printing, something made possible by its use of code as a material and digital print production technologies.

The challenge in our contemporary culture is to understand the impact of digital technologies on our lives, and the implications they have for our experiences of the products and artefacts we create. How can the ‘ultra-digital’ produce or evoke those qualities and idiosincracies that we associate with those articles created by hand or imperfect industrial machines?