By Hand

In today's rainfall of digital information can we still find the time to stop and make sense of information usually considered ephemeral and shallow? My aim as a designer is to create an aesthetic and material response to the abundance of digital information surrounding us.

In today’s world of virtualized production and communication our material sensibility is weakening. Still it is important to learn by making. The mass production of digital technology creates a lack of physicality between the creator and the creation and therefore between us and the world. The empathic and sensorial experiences are speeded up, consequently reducing our comprehension of tangible objects at the same speed.

In this digital climate, Information Design is often seen as a way to make sense of virtual data. As an information designer I want to create sensible products through a manual and intuitive process, steering clear from the digital world and working with material tools and objects to create a material response to the abundance of digital information surrounding us.

I decided to work with a magazine, a material object in which the tactile experience accompanies the visual one. I chose Vogue, not only for aesthetic reasons, but mainly because the value of the handmade is still high in fashion (and especially haute couture).
Using the technique of décollage I cut out all the hands from the magazine, to reflect on the manual labour and experience we loose with digitization.
As a designer I have adopted the approach of the taxonomist, studying and analysing these hands as precious specimens in need of preservation and display. The hands of women and men pictured in the act of touching are taken from the issues of Vogue Italia April 2015 and December 1985, a key year for desktop publishing and consequently for the digital revolution.