“Springtime in New York / when demolishing a building brings the smell of 1890 to the breeze.” —Jonathan Richman, Springtime in New York

I recently finished up some press invitations for a Brooklyn Philharmonic concert. They incorporate the borough’s handsomest of street-features: the brownstone row house, as well as historical maps, typography, and a fake-newspaper-as-a-concert-program. Led by Artistic Director, Alan Pierson, the Philharmonic takes an inspired approach to concert-theming (like Russian Cartoon Music from last year ), creating experiences engineered with surprising little historical touches. This most recent concert, entitled Brooklyn Village, explored the history of life in the borough (once a farming village, then an autonomous city) and highlights the dramatic way that Brooklyn has shape-shifted over time. Here’s DUMBO way before Two Trees ᔥ Brooklyn Historical Society Blog—

The concert included disparate works such as the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s own inaugural performance from 1857 (a piece from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony) and snippets from Sufjan Steven’s “BQE”—weaving this musical history together with dialogue, projections, and other narrative details.

The printed materials for the evening needed to reflect the odd state of place that is Brooklyn—one that is simultaneously awash in its own history and rapidly-changing present.  I wanted to nail down some of the constants of Brooklyn life, while making something that didn’t slavishly adhere to standards of times-past. Street life and street interactions define Brooklyn (for me, at least): public, private, and municipal realities overlap here much more readily than in other places I’ve visited. So I sought out maps first.

The invitation itself was originally slated to be a fairly traditional map, but I ended up screening back the map to minimize competition with the invitation text, enhancing legibility. I Photoshopped-in some of the lettering, hand-drew some of it, and then used modified fonts for the rest.

I added a burst of resplendent perforations to the invitation surface:

This inner invitation sheet arrives folded-up map-style and is delivered within a sleeve shaped like the most salient of Brooklyn architectural mascots: the brownstone! The reverse side is printed with Victoria upholstery patterns, a bit of interior decor which can be reconfigured by folding the map in different ways. Removing the inner invitation entirely reveals a peek into brownstone life with its semi-anonymous silhouettes of human drama.

The sleeves turned out pretty clean + crisp, but there were many surreal/awesome registration misadventures along the way—

The program for the performance also borrows from historical ephemera. In the form of a shrunken period newspaper, it is filled with contextualizing stories from the Brooklyn Phil’s past, stories revealing inspiration for  pieces in the performance, and fictional news stories about the composers themselves (Sufjan Stevens is detained by the NYPD, for example, for wandering aimlessly on the BQE.) It looks a little like a Brooklyn Daily Eagle from the early 1900s, but I took liberty with the type treatments. (The kerning on those early newspapers would drive modern readers mad.) Here is the whole pdf if you want to take a gander.

It sounds like it was an amazing performance, which I regrettably missed (I stayed in and finished another project instead and am now kicking myself).  However, I’m also working on materials for the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s fundraising gala, which I anticipate to be and equally inspired experience (and will have an affordable after party), so I’m eager to beat out my workaholic tendencies and get out there to see it in full!

On Friday, we unveiled a system for attribution on the web called Curator’s Code.

Initially, I was ever-so-slightly skeptical about the Curator’s Code. Creating a formalized “system of attribution for internet content” sounded a bit like piling on rules—and perhaps even creating limitations—in the blissfully limitless (and essentially anarchic) space of the internet. And then I spoke to Maria more about it… (and, immediately inspired, signed-on to create a visual presence for this new movement.)

Maria, who writes the blog, Brainpickings, and works as a contributor to the Atlantic (among a half-dozen other hats she wears) is in the business of content curation+creation—and speaks passionately about attribution as an act of ethical responsibility and an act of creativity. Through attribution, we acknowledge authorship: the creative work of the artists, writers, musicians, et al. who have created the content in the first place (an ethical must in a culture where more powerful entities can exploit this free-floating labor. ↬ Serfing the Web) But through attribution, we also simultaneously give weight to “content curation” itself as a form of authorship—a creative act  (from a real person’s point of view) which adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

On a philosophical level, by attributing sources, we also honor the very concept of discovery. Any one who has lost themselves in hours of reading+clicking on the web and have found themselves wandering down a rabbit hole of links, knows that this can be a magical thing. Interconnectedness is, undoubtedly, one of the preeminent superpowers of the internet as a medium—one that has the potential to better and more realistically maps the flow/exchange of ideas than other mediums. And the ways that those connections happen can be fascinating.  Maria argues that this meta-narrative of where information comes from might be just as interesting as the content itself.

There are two ideas implicit in the Curator’s Code, which made me fall in love with the project:

1.) As there is value in content, there is also value in making the interconnectedness of this content transparent.  By leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others, we are acting good stewards to others’ ability to discover, learn, interpret, and process. Rather that hoarding it for ourselves, why not acknowledge that influence and knowledge are gift economies? ↬ Lewis Hyde

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” — Chuck Palahniuk ᔥ Curator’s Code

2.) By celebrating that ideas do migrate and evolve, we work at dispelling that annoying/dangerous myth of the creative-genius-hit-with-a-lightning-bolt. By paying homage to the fact that all creation is cumulative, collaborative, and gradual, we can evolve the conversation about creativity beyond the inaccurate binary of original/plagiarized. This inaccurate binary worldview is oppressive (at this very moment, there are a hundred art school students simultaneously mouthing “it’s all been done before!” as a lame, but sincerely-felt excuse.) If you disagree with my assessment of creativity, please stop reading this now and see if Jonathan Lethem can sway you with his essay, The Ecstacy of Influence. He makes the argument that every idea has a life independent of its maker. The more that these life-of-ideas gets mapped, the more we actually/functionally defend creative work as a culture.

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Given the weightiness of the content and the delicacy needed in the tone, the design of the Curator’s Code had to walk a fine line. It had to inspire, rather than scold. It had to portray attribution as small acts of activism (enriching the web), rather than simply being an “annoying rule” to follow. So… I decided to have legitimate, honest fun with it.

When Maria began talking about the notion of attribution opening up rabbit holes, I thought, “why not make the site itself a rabbit hole!?!” So for each quote that inspired Maria’s thinking, I illustrated a tunnel of attribution—receding back into the infinite space of the web. It is a completely literal (and self-consciously absurd) picture of the depth brought to the internet through the interconnectedness of attribution. The source-sites fall back in space, and can be casually explored with a responsive, parallax rollover state.

We did it. We poked a hole in the internet to show why the internet is awesome. The Internet is burning a hole of discovery through your very screen!

Read more about Curator’s Code on Brain Pickings, on The New York Times, in The Atlantic, or in Wired UK.

Credit where credit is due: Cameron and Jonnie built the handy-dandy attribution bookmarklet. Ciprian Badea helped me code by building a large part of the site.

A few things that I designed are now for sale on the internet!: a benefit poster and a couple of temporary tattoos.

I created a “children’s poster for adults (or for children)” for Help Ink. Proceeds benefit Room to Read, an organization that promotes literacy by improving access to books and education (with a focus on improving gender equality in education) all around the world. They do amazing work and their statistics correlating literacy with mortality is truly shocking.

When Drew from Help Ink emailed me last year inquiring about a poster, I was already knee-deep in obsessing over voluminous type and wondered if there was a connection here. I felt that the weighty physicality of the type could be turned into a simple reflection on the uneasy authority of our language system. Letterforms can be beautiful, but they are also very strange symbols. During language acquisition, when children begin to map “things” to “constellations-of-letterforms,” this strangeness must be clearly evident. Small tweaks can alter meaning drastically. Letters can be rearranged to create their opposite meaning. Design signals embedded in the written word can deconstruct or wholly change the meaning of that word. The system under which we communicate with words is logically-flawed, fantastical, and surprising (all observations presented and explored to great effect by many of my type-art/design heroes*.)

This print, although it looks like a drawing, is primarily a collage. I scanned in bits and pieces of the textures from etchings in rare books and made a new composition. (There is a little bit of hand-drawing in there, but it is mostly old books that you see, build up piece by piece to make something entirely different.)

Get it here and support a really great organization!

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On a lighter note: Tatt.ly’s! Tina of Swiss Miss has an incredibly fun online shop called Tattly, which secures your ability to cover your body in your favorite artists and designers work without the commitment or pain of a real tattoo.

I made a tattoo encouraging the beholder to “Carpe Futurum!”—a cry to defend the future against the plague of short-term thinking (although you can probably both seize the day and seize the future, they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive sentiments.)

My new Tatt.lys, requested especially by Tina are numbers, plain and simple. You can now wear your anniversary on your arm, broadcast your love of the number three, or throw a birthday party for the single-digit crowd.

*For more on this type of work and these ideas, refer to Ed Ruscha, Tauber Auerbach, Mario Hugo, Steve Lambert…and there are probably another dozen artists that deal with this idea (albeit in different ways) in their work to whom I am indebted…

I’m happy to report that my TEDx talk from last year is up. (Thanks TEDx Phoenix!)

Aside from just showing/explaining pictures, the talk makes the case for creating absurdist/surreal work that disrupts our preconceived notions about the world through small, intimate experiences. This type of work can defy conventional expectations by presenting the hidden “talents” of everyday things that we easily take for granted. On a handheld level, these projects rail against unnecessary/unhelpful assumptions—the kind that lurk in the unexamined, quotidian corners of our day-to-day. In these very places of non-examination, the tiniest of subversions can open up small, alternate realities and become amplified into (modest) conversion experiences about our surroundings.

The talk aims to articulate that idea. I wouldn’t say that this idea presents itself in the foreground of everything I make, but it is a consideration… (And this is the second time I’ve ever been on a stage, so even though I am smiling: it was terrifying!)

The talk was so short and paired-down that I didn’t get to thank anyone or cite sources or influences, so here’s a little bit of that!:  Here is the link to the large-scale NY Times collaboration, where you can read stories from the Utopian future circa 2008. That project was organized (and largely written by) the Yes Men and Steve Lambert, although there were probably 1000+ small contributors. Daniel made the paper’s layout, typography, etc. look just like a real NY Times. Reaction footage came from Joseph Huff-Hannon‘s videos, mostly… (I think) Thanks Jeff Rutzky for introducing me to the looping card format and helping me make my desktop cutter work, which has been the source of many hours of frustrating but fulfilling experimentation. Thanks Daniel (and friends) for providing me with feedback on how to translate my ideas into plain english. Photo credit goes to @goproaudio aka Nick Taylor.

I just noticed a trend in my own work (which I’ve  been regrettably slow to post lately…): everything has been “about” the almighty dollar lately.  There’s been more substantial discussion regarding U.S. economic policy in the news— which is increasingly being scrutinized like a machine, whose various features exert invisible, systematic influence over our lives. The consequences of the “design” of economic systems has turned into a mainstream conversation about real inequity—rather than a theoretical one among academics. Even the Republicans are mouthing words like “inequity” and are discussing tax brackets. It’s crazy! In honor of this new state of elevated policy chatter, here are the last five infographics I’ve had the pleasure of working on… and they’re all about money. From football to collaborative-consumption-accomodations, everything is being cast in a greener, but less bling-y light. (Even discussions about art quickly shift to discussions about the economics of art.) I won’t bore you with my abundant opinions here, but suffice it to say that it has been an interesting start to 2012. Here are some things I’ve worked designed within the past 6-7 weeks, which look at money and economic systems in a variety of unusual ways.

(Note: Click on “Click to Enlarge”‘s to read the details.)

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The Hirst Index

First up is an infographic commissioned by Hemispheres magazine, about infamous artist and expert value-manipulator, Damien Hirst (who I first came to know through his contributions to the Tate’s Sensation exhibition, when he was “the shark guy,” and is now known as “the polka dot guy.” We pitted the swell of Hirst’s work valuation against growth in various stock markets to compare their relative performance through the duration of the economic crisis. In the line graph, I represented Hirst as a soaring spike of his own signature dots (with the S&P and Dow Jones average crawling along far, far below.) The background composition is perforated with punches, reminiscent of  cancelled paper checks from bygone banking days (a banking analog to Hirst’s gridded dots.)

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Walk the Scales of Wealth Inequity!

It was an honor to be entrusted with the back page of n+1′s Occupy! Gazette number 3. This is what I devised: a map inspired by OWS as a physical occupation in real city space. It shows wealth inequities mapped out in real city space at a scale of 1 mile : 20K income/yr. Taking the tongue-in-cheek form of a tourist’s “scales of the universe walking tour” map, it encourages the viewer to feel the scale of wealth inequity by walking it.  Like the scales of the universe maps, which translate the distances between planets into units of blocks-in-a-city (wherein you start at the sun and then Mars is 3 blocks away and Earth is 20 blocks away, etc…), the scales of wealth transposes income inequities onto city geography itself. The center of the map is the average income of the average wage earner—the home of the 99%, Zuccotti park. From there, the average incomes of other percentiles (the top 1%, the top 10%, the bottom 50%, etc) are mapped out longitudinally, with very lowest income earners (the bottom .01%)  falling somewhere around the Red Hook Ballfields and the highest income earners (the top .01%) falling almost in the arctic circle in Prince Edward Island, Canada.  Walking from the average person’s income (in Zucotti park) to the bottom of the income scale will cost you your morning, whereas walking to the very top of the income scale would take 18+ days of continuous walking (thus revealing the totally-insane skewing of wealth to the topmost echelon of income earners.)

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AirBnb 2012 Infographic

For the second year in a row, I charted AirBnb’s meteoric growth in a very tall, skinny graphic. More and more people all over the world are staying in homes, rather than hotels, when they travel (this seems to be especially prevalent in cities like NYC, where space is scarce and pricey.) It is the idea of collaborative consumption playing out on a massive scale. Here’s some of the economic data, as well as some more qualitative stuff:

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The Economics of the Superbowl

Another infographic/illustration commissioned by Hemispheres magazine, this one takes a look at a money and the Superbowl. How much do the players on the teams get paid to play? What [ridiculous amount] do tickets cost? How much do game attendees spend during the Superbowl? Etc… etc…  Needless to say, there is a lot of money wrapped up in this game.

Knowing nothing about football, but having seen stadiums before, I dropped all of the statistics into a circular graph wrapping around simplified stadium seating, with the field anchoring the composition in the center.

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Social Contingencies – AirBnb Ecosystem

Another “infographic” (more of an illustration, really) for a presentation by AirBnb about the social contingencies of their business model. Like energy-resources in a natural ecosystem, money-resources flow within the system of exchange set up by AirBnb. I sketched out a diagram showing who/what stands to gain from AirBnb’s business model (aside from AirBnb itself—I should point out that they also [obviously] benefit financially from their business model.) The money first goes from traveler to host…

… and into dispersed local economies, rather that consolidated international hotel chains…

…while building a global network of trust between travelers…

If you have a business—rather than slapping on a token badge of social responsibility, why not create a business model from the ground up which empowers individuals, promotes the sharing of resources, and brings money into local economies? (Now someone just needs to figure out how to “green” travel…)

It is the end of the year already, the perfect time to reflect, to quantify…to make tons of infographics (of course!) This bunch was actually made about a month ago, but are just getting published now. Although perhaps these examples are more like “info-strations” than strict infographics (which is more of a defined, specific thing at this point, right?)  It seems to me that infographics start with purely conceptual information and devise a symbolic language to express this information—though color, proportions, etc. The illustrations in this post, on the other hand, start and end in a more tangible real-world place. Each assignment (by virtue of coincidence) had a logical physical analog that I was able to use as a jumping-off-point. So infographic or illustration: these were made to marry the tangible, familiar ‘thingness’ of the subject with non-visual information made visible…which (fortunately) tends to be the type of surprising information that makes you realize that you know less about the thing than originally thought.

This first one was made for Fast Company and compares the manufacturing-to-consumer-to-recycling loop of plastic bottles to that of paper bottles (through a case study of Seventh Generation’s new packaging):  

There are undoubtedly several things to be gleaned from this graphic, but the most salient thing for me is the notion that recyclability is not equal among recyclables. The product design itself must consider the entire manufacturing journey in order to achieve a significant benefit from its recyclability. Manufacturing efficiency must essentially be “built in.” Since manufacturing is something that happens in the landscape, connected by highways, I made two parallel islands showing the two differing bottle-journeys. Each step occurs at a different facility, so the steps are indicated by building stops in the loops.

Due to layout and text changes, the published graphic will look like this more-streamlined version:

This second illustration is for Wired UK and concerns content farms and e-book publishing.  Apparently, large online booksellers (Amazon) are being overrun with titles that are not actually written by a human beings.  Content farms, disguised as a single author, write a [miraculous!] hundreds of books a year by plagiarizing other sources and frankensteining it all together to form a new e-book. The super-human quantity of books that these so-called-writers author per year raises a red flag, but a qualitative glimpse is the really funny part.  So, without further ado, I present to you the work of Mr. “Manuel Ortiz Braschi”, esteemed author on virtually every topic in the known world (or at least, the best-selling topics in the known world.) Here is what he’s got in Amazon on the Kindle, by category, displayed on a bookshelf:

For United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, they approached me to illustrate a Christmas tree, by the numbers.  It is a Christmas-tree shaped infographic about a world full of Christmas trees:

Apparently the world’s most expensive Christmas tree (thus far…and hopefully ever!) was an $11 million tree in Abu Dhabi. Islam is officially the state religion in UAE, but Abu Dhabi is also the richest city in the world… so why not?!

And here are two tiny illustrations for Wired UK, both of which accompany small blurbs in the front of the November and December issue.

This one compares the torque (power) of electric cars currently available on the market via illustrations of varying scales:

And this one reveals the decibel level of top popular songs over time— in the shape of a bar graph emanating from a speaker:

Speaking succinctly about visuals is tedious (for anyone who has read Wittgenstein, you’ll see that it takes a brilliant man scores of pages to verbalize what we intuit about experiencing color.) Describing visual perception with an economy of language is impossible. And: curating your own work is no fun at all. So writing these talks has been a struggle. I’m grateful there was a deadline because I would have never done it otherwise. 

For these talks, I’m putting on the blinders and will be focusing on a narrow trend I see in my work—something that just “happens” given the right project and the right circumstances. A few past projects demonstrate this thing pretty well. These projects create the impression that there is possibility hiding in plain view—lurking in the territory just beyond our assumptions. They pull back the curtain that separates the realm of expectations from the realm of the absurd.

So I’m going to discuss these projects as a process (or perhaps more of a chain-reaction than a process.) This is how it seems to work: 1.) Consider the dominant collective assumptions about a thing, 2.) Grow restless and indignant about those confining assumptions, and then 3.) (ideally) Locate a path to challenge them with a radical reinterpretation of that experience*.  (*Modest, handheld experiences work best. Humble materials are the sneakiest and most apt to proffer this sense of disruptive wonder.)  It comes down to an interest in finding “the hidden talents of everyday things.” It is difficult to explain, but it always starts out with doing things exactly wrong in an attempt to get something more interesting than just “good.”

Among the successful examples of this this line of thinking are the paper record player and the New York Times from the Utopian Future. Both of these projects started from a place of acute dissatisfaction with the state of affairs:  the wedding-invite format felt like a wholly lame venue for me to celebrate the awesomeness of my two friends; and the daily newspaper is depressing (the news always falls short of what I’d want from a participatory democracy.)  So the wedding invitation turned out to be a paper record player — and the newspaper turned into a roadmap to an attainable utopian future. Both play upon and expand the expectations of this media: Can paper work as a speaker?  Can a newspaper reframe reality to inspire action?  I have faith that these small experiences can ignite a sense of inquiry about the things we most often take for granted.

However, in articulating these ideas, I realized that a simpler project predates both of these examples, but shares in this same string of thought.  I had never properly documented it, but the talks made documentation a priority. So I shot a video. It’s a card that I made for friends for the holidays in 2009, inspired by the format of Jeff Rutzky’s business card.

Here’s the story:

The debate in my head began in November. I felt the age-old-holiday-conflict: I wanted to let friends know that I was thinking of them around the holidays, but even more than that I wanted to give them something thoughtful that would transcend the normal going-through-the motions holiday thing.

So… I ended up with a very ridiculous card. From the outside, It looks like a normal, flat paper card, so the recipient comes to the experience with the assumption that this is a normal card.  But paper never forgets how it was bent, it has a memory.  I used that material memory to guide the recipients through the experience of the card. When you pick it up, it is immediately apparent that while floppy, it want bends in these specific ways. As people tinker with it, it’s activated by their curiosity. They slowly discover that bending the card moves them through a simple story. A story about itself. The card is literally a four-frame documentary about receiving the card.  Take a look:

So it is a recursive experience of a card – that talks about the repetitive ritual of all cards.  It is a card about cards with a card-experience portrayed within a card-experience.

So the cool thing about it (besides being a total mindfuck -yay!) is that it defies this idea that paper is 2-dimensional. It begins life as a regular, 8.5×11 piece of paper. Its a tricky object, but you can see that it really does begin life as something spit out by my inkjet printer:

So, I got to challenge the assumptions about “cards” and their parameters, which laid the road for things like the paper record player and the utopian newspaper. This little project ended up being a useful metaphor. Writing these talks has strengthened my resolve to remain in this trajectory and continue making work like this.

I recently worked on some projects with/for Jeff Mangum of the Neutral Milk Hotel, making things like posters, cards, shirts, and a new website. The new website features unreleased Neutral Milk Hotel songs, a new vinyl box set, a radio show, and a long descent through clouds moving in parallax—check it out!  (Built in MODx.)

I just designed a bright orange popsicle truck that evangelizes solar energy. It is actually a popsicle truck covered in popsicle-shaped-infographics about solar energy that distributes free popsicles!

The multitasking contraption also runs off of solar energy when stopped, effectively demonstrating how solar can power the activity of a bustling kitchen.

This fun project, lead by Jason Anello, is going to roll towns wherein this solar power company (Sungevity) operates and hand out free, artisanally-made popsicles to the energy- (and apparently popsicle-) consuming public. With any luck, the combination of sugar, facts, and the threat-of-humanity’s-self-inflicted-demise-owing-to-dirty-energy will be persuasive enough to get some people off the grid.

Jason brought me into the fold after he was already sourcing parts. Although the truck looks like it must have been born this way, it actually began life as a standard-issue mail truck:

Jason had a chop shop change the shape of the front, drop the entire truck down a few inches, and outfit it with solar power. He also added “leveling” hydraulics to avoid the truck-tilt caused by the convex banking streets (a phenomenon that imbues the onlooker with a sense of psychological dread tantamount to being on the leaning side of a Richard Serra.) A press of the keyfob ceremoniously erects the solar panels and serving windows in a slow, majestic sort of levitation/transformation—much like the batmobile (or one of those -mobiles.) I’m not much of a car person, but even I know that this is fancy.

Check out Jason’s documentation video, which showcases his attention to detail with this thing:

As people queue around the truck, they are brought into close range of the infographics. The statistics are incredible. They quickly reveal that the amount of energy needed to fuel all human activity is trivial when compared to the amount of energy in a day’s worth of sunlight. And yet, solar accounts for less than 1% of all energy in the U.S (thanks, coal lobby…)

The entire truck was designed and assembled in 6 weeks. I took two different design approaches for the graphics (which were developed before we knew the actual dimensions of the truck, so the components had to remain relatively flexible.)

The first approach utilized the surface of the truck to diagram its the energy-producing activity, (showing how solar works):

Since this solar company, Sungevity, is grid-tied, the diagram also shows how excess solar is fed back into the grid, and how energy can also be pulled from the grid when necessary—essentially using the grid like a battery. I found the logic of this process elegant, and was excited to showcase it, but the strange shape of the truck called for much cleaner lines than the diagram required.

The second approach was to place a stripe of popsicle infographics around the truck.

This clean line seemed to bring order to an otherwise strangely-shaped canvas, while also introducing color. Since the truck will be experienced at a variety of distances, the fact that it moves conceptually from “colorful stripe” to “popsicles” to “infographics” with diminishing distance is pleasing. The infographic-pops allow for a lot of different types of solar power information in a very small space, which is probably more useful to the consumer than the nuts and bolts of how solar power works.

The truck was in NYC this week, but it is now headed to Boston, Take a look at Sungevity’s twitter feed for their exact location and go grab a free popsicle!

I just finished an ambitious infographic for Collaborative Fund envisioning how the concept of collaborative consumption could replace traditional consumption in the average home. Collaborative consumption is a simple idea: use the connecting-power of the internet to help people to share things that they don’t need (or don’t want) to buy—resulting in a more efficient use of resources. Collaborative models are frequently discussed in abstract terms—speculation about potential outcomes and distribution abound—but rarely in terms of everyday life. So this graphic shows how it really, actually is working… in a little Mr.-Rogers-neighborhood-home. Check it out here:

In highlighting how frequently much of the “stuff” lies dormant, the purpose of this graphic is two-fold—
• To show that now we now can share rather than buy (there is a viable alternative to purchasing many of the low-use items in a typical home)
• To identify infrequently-used items with a high potential for profit—when shared on one of these peer-to-peer sites, rather than cluttering up an attic

The infographic is a play on the familiar form of the exploded diagram—typically used to diagram complex engineered machinery (like car engines…assembly instructions for children’s toys, etc…) Employing this format underscores the point that this is an in-depth, detailed study of modern consumption. The requisite visual complexity of this type of diagram means that it is literally teeming with stuff. Admittedly, the aim of most infographics is to simplify and “break it down” for the viewer. While I wanted to keep it legible and not feel like a punch in the eye, it toes the line and fully embraces the visual cacophony of the exploded diagram form. No other format so elegantly says “this is far too much fucking stuff” quite like the dry-witted exploded diagram.

Engineers do not have a corner on the exploded diagram market (go pick apart your favorite social problems with one today!)

This project was super-fun and enlightening since I had the opportunity to work with some great people (with great ideas)—chiefly, Craig Shapiro and Rachel Botsman. Watch Rachel’s TED Talk to learn more about the philosophy behind the shift to collaborative businesses that enable sharing of consumer goods.