1. How do we unite our communities?

In this project we were given the design challenge to give back to our Design Center and its inhabitants. My team and myself decided to give back to our Design Center community by uniting them around an inside joke regarding our outrageously slow (and dangerous) elevator–to do this we began to create “club t-shirts” and other merchandise for inhabitants of the Design Center to wear and display. The merchandise we made featured a piece of graffiti that somebody scribbled in a moment of frustration with the slowness of the elevator, on the elveator’s safety certificate reading, “plese faster lift!︎”

Our team established a visual language that embodied excitement, levity, and speed.

We thought that adding humor and excitement to a mundane frustration, whilst highlighting the unorthodox unity of our shared daily experience in the slow elevator, to be an embodiment of the spirit of the space of the Design Center.

2. Let’s slow it down.

While the elevator in the Design Center is painfully slow, it does not have to feel slow. I decided to change the user experience of the elevator by creating and interactive installation for the users of the elevator.

This instalation is an elevator manifesto, cut out in vinyl, and easily moved, read, and destroyed by the elevator’s users. The slow ride on the elevator would pass by extremely quickly when people were interacting with the vinyl letters. Furthermore, users began to draw their own doodles and write their own greivances on the elevator walls for months after the installation was taken down.

Manifesto:

This lift is a utopia︎! One which enables us to move faster upwards than our bodies could allow. Its white walls drip in the (unattainable) strive for perfection. They are calloused. They are bound–in layers of stale white house paint. The stale paint masks the colorful scribbles which do not belong to the homogenized utopian white walls, lit with fluorescent lights.

[WE]. As artists/designers: We have the luxury to create, due to our unique skill sets,  and, our perspectives. The creations we make must be suitable for the public. We must hold the public in higher regard than ourselves. Yet, we must create as to represent ourselves, not mask nor inflate our identities. In so doing, we hold our individual identities in higher regard than the public’s mass identity, but acknowledge that our individual identities comprise the public’s mass.

[YOU]. Each colorful act of vandalism on the white walls of our lift are view finders that wink into the scope of who you are. show your cheek, with the gritty integrity that the unseen mandates. If, you choose to participate, make something that is not only visually ple(a)sing to all those who ride this lift, but create something that goes beyond the fast interaction in order to find the pragmatism in the superfluous doodles you mindlessly flourish from your fingertips onto the layers of paint which embed your drawings in these walls.