1A2 products: the ordinary

Mission Statement: 

Our products are never hi-tech, and always low-fi. They are simple to make and use. Once you've bought one, it'll last your life-time (if you take good care of it). We use low-obstruction materials and tools, with the aim of enhancing simple but important skills (enabling and empowering the user). All our products and services are created to spur and support design-authoring.

Product Description:

The ordinary is the equivalent of the dictionary in the area of ordering. In standard version it comes with 13 hand-sown folders (made up of 3 lined and 3 blank sheets plus a cover). The ordinary comes with an instruction manual about how to make new folders, and a method to develop your ordinary. This means that after the initial cost of € 63 you're on your own.

Our first customer at 1A2 is Professor in Social Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who recently commissioned an ordinary from us (in deluxe-version).

Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Need Assessment:

In the eyes of the associates at 1A2 there is currently a need to conceptualise the transformation of information into data: we call this transformation design authoring. We live in a world where yesterday's information appears as today's noise. And an increasing number of people experience trouble to even remember yesterday's information. 

This is because remembrance requires techniques, rather than technology: simple manpowered machines rather than automation, with tangible or malleable interfaces (i.e., low-fi pre-structure). We need artefacts of this kind to feature the work of remembrance, and make effective claims to knowledge. Design authoring therefore should be understood as a category of intellectual work – a job that needs to be done.

As long as knowledge is information it belongs to someone else. Before it gets passed the threshold of authoring the knowledge you add to information is (and remains) alienated. The ordinary is accordingly created to support you in remembering yesterday's information and generating your data for tomorrow. 

Outside the context of remembrance and claims information is noise. By designing a context for your information, you transform information into data. And you are thereby at liberty of making new uses of your knowledge, which – henceforth – is yours. The ordinary comes with the following quote of Walter Benjamin on a sticker:

The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation...

(the rest of the quotes comes with the methodology we deliver with the ordinary).

1A2 associates: Theo Barth & Bjørn Blikstad.