When: 2010
Who: self initiated/a secret club
Free Fortune Telling is a small research project that explores a number of things that continue to interest me:
Formats.Formats seem to have a fate, flyers are for events and these black/white photocopied A4 sheets with slits cut at the bottom are for when you no longer want your sofa of if you want your pet back. They are never used for selling many sofas, they're only used for selling one sofa.
Production. The photocopy interest me because zines interest me and because the idea of small scale mass production is a (not the) way forward. I'm interested in upping the game for the photocopy, so for this project colour is added, this is also because of:
Activities. The reason for starting this project is because more and more of the work I do is in the form of events, activities or workshops where people get a souvenir to remind them of an experience. (More on this in the descriptions of the events). These events are shared experiences and moments of play and I wanted to explore the possibility of creating this human interaction without actually being there.
Influencing people. That is what graphic designers do. We change they way people see things and if we don't, then we're pretty lousy at our jobs. Yes, this might be some moral-highground-schmalz but I think that we designers should try to use our skills to make the world better, I believe we can both sell detergent and make the world a nicer/more interesting/more fun/less ugly place and I think this should be in the interrest of our clients too as it will ultimately make them look damn good.
For that reason, this fortune telling project was made to give people a little micro-kick when they receive their fortune and a slightly bigger one when it comes true - the key to the fortunes are that they are either very little things that you don't care much about (like finding a penny) or things that you can easily make come true with very little effort (like getting someone to wave at you).
I added little tickboxes for people to mark whether the fortune came true or not, just to let them know that pretending to know the future is silly and that I, as the one telling the fortunes, am not so certain of my skills.