designswarm thoughts

I’m sitting here in Schipol airport, majorly delayed, so I thought I’d do something constructive and write about a few projects from Sacral design a great exhibition put together at the Designmai festival in Berlin. I think it’s interesting to look at a body of work that addresses the presence / absence of belief in our everyday connected lives especially after Godtube made it to the Guardian.

The Way of the cross by Jens Wunderling is a project that enables the actor to relive parts of the last days of Christ according to the Bible.

“the traditional way of the cross which normally appears in the form of 14 images in a church or 14 stations along a pilgrims’ path is transformed into a sound installation. Its core element is a large wooden cross which is carried along a path marked by 14 prtable stations.

At each Station, the cross comes to life and from inside the wood news articles, read by a computer voice, become audible.”

The other project, which isn’t documented on the site for some reason, adressed the idea of anonymously connecting with your fellow believers. Using Bluetooth networks, the little trinkets , symbolically shaped like fish, will vibrate if they find other holders of the fish within a 15 meter radius. It’s interesting to see this project replace church going with the connectedness of urban space.

There’s something to be said for the systems we are designing now that create a sense of community in urban space now that we are culturally estranged from the use of traditional architectural communal places like a piazza, a library, a church.