A coding system? - Bitly

LETTER no.51 Wednesday, January 27, 2016, Berlin on iversity / on design 1o1 redux website Part 2 - My House / Week 04 - My Guests Greetings from the garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie! The Design 1o1 crew is now having a picnic, we are so thrilled! By the way, this Nationalgalerie we are at is an impressive space (well of course it is, Mies Van der Rohe designed it...). If you happen to go to Berlin, check it out for yourself!

Question of the day: A coding system? Think of the address book. You (or your parents) used to have a paper one. Do you / they still use it? You probably replaced it for the one included in your cellphone: a list of “contacts”. There, you probably keep your contact’s names and telephone numbers. You might also keep their email addresses and, for those of you who like to send postcards, you might even like to keep your contact’s physical addresses… Fantastic. Aren’t we lucky to have phones for storing / organizing in an alphabetical (and searchable) order all our contacts? We think so! But then, what about this “special” list of friends / contacts we’ve been working on? We already (most probably) know their phone numbers, email (and other) addresses, etcetc.

Which other bits of information about them could we want to record / classify / remember? This is what we will work on in the next days: we will find and assign new codes for our address book contacts to be classified (and identified) in some different way.

What will I do today? Today you will select a rule or “coding system” for your address book. What do you want to record / classify? How could you “classify” these special people you chose? Imagine that a circle becomes as a “timeline”. You could add your friends on this timeline following the logic that each point (or person) is a birthday. This is one example of the many possibilities. More examples? Imagine the solar system, each planet being a friend of yours. Who is Venus? Who is Pluto? :o What about the constellations? Each friend could be a constellation, or a star within a constellation… :o You could go simpler. A white background and 16 pairs of eyes, each of a given color. Even simpler? Classify them by sex: boys and girls. How far away do they live from you? This could be another thing to explore…

Think about it and choose a way to classify your friends. Then, find 3 different ways to visualize / organize / represent this classification. Once you have your 3 images ready, share them with us on Instagram (as 3 individual posts) using the hashtags: #WhoIsPluto and #Design1o1Redux. Then, add a short (and meaningful) caption to accompany your images and hashtags.

What will I learn doing this? To communicate something using a coded system chosen by you. A very important skill to have for designers!

Why do we do this? Because if you are able to do this, you will inspire other people into learning to do so as well. This is a part of the “power of transmission” we were talking about yesterday. Or as Aldous Huxley would say: “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” By changing oneself and developing new skills, we transfer energy / knowledge / magic to others. :-)

Something to remember: To change oneself, one step at a time, to change the world.

Further inspiration On today’s video-postcard, you will find that some of the people in the Design 1o1 crew were transformed into characters from Fellini’s 8 ½ movie. If you think about it, this is some kind of a “coding” language. Each one of us is a character. We won’t tell you who is who because it is time to get to work, but we felt that it was a nice thing to bring up. More inspiration? The morse code. A classification of hair types. Information is beautiful!

Today’s Postcard References Aldous Huxley

Swiss Army knife Neue Nationalgalerie

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