Last night, I easily wasted 4 hours on
StumbleUpon. One of the clever things it brought to my attention was the work of
Candy Chang.
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| from candychang.com |
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| from candychang.com |
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| from candychang.com |
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| from candychang.com |
Her work is centred around urban installations that aim to bring communities together. "
Before I die..." was the first one I "stumbled" across, which was quite inspiring. It's in the Hurricane Katrina stricken New Orleans, which still shows signs of the damage from 2005.
It's a really interesting way of bringing the community together, and I suppose is a bit like an open questionnaire. Passers by are invited to complete the sentence "Before I die..." on a large scale chalk board, with coloured chalk available. I wish I had permission to do something like this for our current assignment, where one of the options is based around finding out what people treasure the most.
Another of her projects, which is quite similar to one of the mind mapping methods we looked at, as well as being mentioned on
Service Design Tools as the "Blueprint" method, was her "Post-it Notes For Neighbours" installation. It invites people to anonymously leave information about their living situation, giving people an idea of rent prices in various areas, this time set in Brooklyn, New York on a shop front. I really like temporary work such as this, as participants feel they are special to have the opportunity to be part of something that only lasts for such a short window of time.
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| from candychang.com |
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| from candychang.com |
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| from candychang.com |
I highly recommend spending even just 5 minutes on her
site looking through her projects, but I guarantee you will be on it for longer than 5 minutes. Her work really is addictive and clever - Tenants Rights Flash Cards is another example of one of her good ideas. I'm not sure what she would class herself as, that is to say if she is categorisable at all. Some of her projects/installations seem to be a form of service design - amongst a multitude of other things, but she is stated on her site to be "a public installation artist, designer, urban planner, and co-founder of Civic Center who likes to make cities more comfortable to people" - which is quite nice really isn't it?
Her twitter is @candychang - needless to say I have already started to follow her!
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