“Toilet seats. Slightly off in size”, Alisha says, “or in height – so that the seat is lower than you would expect”. Alisha, Guillermo and me are sitting in the Hi-fi / Lo-fi studio. Her statement is one of those that are necessary to break a too deep and too thoughtful silence when you desperately try to come up with an idea.
Our 2-day assignment is to think about “BIG and little”, a challenge given by the amazing Robert Krulwich from Radiolab. The three of us have chosen to frame the task in an “urban environment context”. Which sounded like a good idea at the time but turns out to be really hard: Now we need to meet the “BIG and little” AND the “urban” requirement.
We bounce intellectual, deep and educational ideas off each other: We want to show the “hidden system” that enables a city to function but that no one usually thinks about. We think about subway tunnels and pipe systems, electricity and communication cables. We want to visualize them by creating a subway car with projections on its ceiling, so passengers can “see” the area between tunnel and street. We take the idea one step further and think about institutions that keep a city functioning, like the fire and policy departments. We want to visualize where all the trash goes. Nothing sticks.
Brett Renfer is a great studio leader. He tries to get us onto a different path. Now we want to visualize the size of a city by projecting all its people on ground floor level. Users would find themselves in a kind of parabolic dish where they see masses of people. Or they run on a treadmill past all those people – one by one. But who would run so far …?
Our minds keep wandering. We explore the idea of demonstrating city size in form of height by having people look up into an artificial, very high ventilation shaft.
And then Alisha comes up with the toilet seat …