Close Origins
Role
Undergraduate research assistant and manuscript co-author
Made with
Prof. Audrey Desjadins Ph.D.
Timeline
12 weeks
Project
Project Overview
Close Origins is a twelve-week, first-person research-through-design inquiry by a group of eight design researchers into how we work with material traces from our own bodies, routines, and homes. We made more than 24 trace artifacts over five rounds, met weekly for critique, and analyzed them together. The analysis produced three ways of working with traces: imprinting, revealing, and bounding. Within the group, my own thread was context: what happens to a personal trace when its context is revealed or withheld.
Challenge
Data is often treated as immaterial, collected constantly and rarely felt, which makes it easy to forget the lives it came from. We asked what we could learn by working with traces from our own lives and deciding for ourselves what to collect, preserve, and share. My thread asked: how does the amount of information you have change how you perceive a trace? Does removing context make it less personal, or only change what it presents and to whom? I explored this in a series of four sets of traces from my own body and daily life, taking context away piece by piece.
Results
The paper identifies three practices. Imprinting transfers a trace between surfaces. Revealing uses a setup or instrument to make a latent trace perceivable. Bounding isolates a trace with a frame, page, or container, and every act of bounding removes some context. It makes two contributions: it extends autographic design to traces where the designer is part of the trace’s origin, and it places design work upstream of any fixed dataset, in the choices that decide what becomes a record at all. The work is first-person and situated in our group and setting, it makes no claims about how audiences respond, and it was reviewed by our university’s ethics board as minimal risk.
trace artifacts
weeks