Kelli Anderson: The Hidden Talents of Everyday Things
Kelli Anderson is a designer who likes to find the hidden talents of everyday things. Her TED talk is titled “Disruptive Wonder for a Change.”
“As we go through our everyday lives, visual and experiential things exert this invisible authority over our brains. They wield this authority in subtle and sneaky ways.”
“I want to create disruptive wonder. I want to confound these expectations. The small things we make can reinforce our assumptions about the world – OR – small things can come out of left field and jar us into reassessing our complacent expectations about reality.”
“The world is full of order that doesn’t necessarily deserve our respect. Sometimes there’s meaning, justice, and logic present in the way things are. But sometimes there just isn’t. And I think that the moment we realize this is the moment we become creative people.”
Anderson describes “three projects that try to do something better by doing something more absurd.”
1. A holiday card that tells a story about itself. It unfolds over and over to deliver a four-frame documentary about receiving the card – illustrating how ritual becomes an empty gesture. “The more an experience repeats itself, the less it means.”
2. A wedding invitation that becomes a playable record, completely made out of paper. It challenges the assumption that paper is silent.
3. A counterfeit edition of the New York Times filled with stories from an alternate reality, dated six months into the future. “The real news is depressing. We never see the stories we want to see in the newspaper. So we put in only good news. We put in all the policy ideas that we thought would actually help the world.”
“By rejecting normal order, by messing things up, and by rearranging the pieces, we can expand our notion of what we demand from reality. An avenue to better is through a million teeny tiny disruptions to whatever is sitting in front of you. So go mess with the complacently rational.”
You can see more of Kelli Anderson’s work at kellianderson.com (or illsnorenaked.com)