An experiment in collaborative publishing
Overview
Collate was a physical installation created for the London Design Festival at the V&A Museum. The project invited visitors to collaboratively produce a printed publication — exploring what happens when the tools of digital creation are brought into a shared physical space.
Concept
The project grew out of conversations about the rise of visual-focused social networks and user-driven aggregators like Pinterest. With the growth of online communities, consumption of information has become a more active experience — we are now all able to create and publish content instantly. Collate brought this experience into a physical space.
Installation
The installation was built around a series of touchscreens and projections contained within a glass structure. Images were downloaded automatically according to the daily themes of the festival. Visitors could move through three distinct stages: tagging images with descriptive words, designing page spreads by scaling, positioning and layering images, and voting on the layouts they wanted included in the final book.
Interaction
We kept the image manipulation tools deliberately simple, focusing on storytelling through juxtaposition. Visitors responded creatively; repeating images into abstract patterns, grouping by colour and the tagging phase proved equally engaging. Rather than describing images literally, visitors were encouraged to associate words freely. At one point, six people gathered around a single screen debating the best word to describe a photograph of a shell on a beach.
Output
We didn't edit or select any of the spreads — the resulting book was the raw output of the installation, auto-paginated by an algorithm. We designed the tools and the container, not the content. The final publication brings together the most popular spreads generated and voted on by visitors, alongside texts by Joël Vacheron, Rob Alderson and Silvio Lorusso, and was made available via Blurb as a print-on-demand publication — a fitting format for a work with no traditional editorial hand.
