1988-2000… 100-some video portraits + an interactive installation at the Exploratorium.
Once upon an expedition to Japan in 1984, Strickland encountered expressions of a culture that’s enormously sophisticated in the ways of folding, stacking, rolling, nesting, carrying, miniaturizing, and transforming things. Transporting that inspiration and proceeding to unpack it several years later, Portable Effects is a video anthropology project that investigates people’s design of the miniature environments we carry with us—in pockets, backpacks, briefcases, and handbags. Between setting forth in the morning and returning home at night, every person lives nomadically for a portion of each day. You can’t take everything with you—neither in your backpack nor in your head. Identifying essentials, figuring out how to contain, arrange and keep track of them as you go, are instances of design thinking. Portable Effects has been supported by Apple Computer, the National Endowment for the Arts, Interval Research Corporation, and the San Francisco Exploratorium.
Download text » Portable Effects: A Survey of Nomadic Design Practice, 1997
Learn more about the museum exhibit » www.portablefx.com
