Co-creation.
Design is much a part of our everyday lives as we want it to be, it can be a celebration or simply an acknowledgment of everyday actions, a practice to re-create our lives in the discovery of the new and unexpected that can emerge from the everyday.

Creative work can bring to life the unseen and the unknown if it can go beyond the self and the ego to allow energies of the environment to conceive a work that is beyond our limited perspective. This project makes a conscious intention to build upon these forces and energies by devising methods, for participation and collaboration at different levels to occur. A living work that grows in its unpredictability while operating within the specificity of its methodology.

The everyday.
What do you want to be, Strange•R? is an exploration that brings forth the everyday as a subject of investigation.
The environment which we share, the city we commute in, the neighbourhood where we locate our home, the strangers that we pass by, the objects that we use, the parts of our everyday life. The everyday is that which is the commonplace, the familiar, the habitual, the obvious, the recurring. Strangers in the city, objects in our home are parts of this everyday landscape that is now deployed as the protagonists in this searching look at the everyday.

The city, the stranger and the object.
Strangers and everyday objects are seemingly insignificant occurrences in our everyday lives that often go unnoticed, they are put in that background of our activities that we have no time for, no reason to, no purpose in, can’t take the risk in engaging them. By bringng our interaction with them out of the routine into a level of creative consciousness, we may perhaps begin to see the surprise, the delight, the astonishment that we thought has eluded us forever. We become aware of new and different perspectives amidst the supposed mundaneness and banality of the everyday.

What do you want to be Strange•R? is a creative process that collects the everyday experiences of the people in the city and translates them onto everyday objects. These varied and random interpretations will see the transformation of the everyday object into something that can be used in a renewed way and at the same time tells of the stories of the city.

In constituting the energy of the city, the project calls for the participation of the people in the city, by consciously engaging with the environment, exploring the relationships with strangers and objects. In the process mapping out journeys and collecting chance and random but yet deliberate moments, observations and encounters.

Storytelling.
We begin to construct stories, as real as they are imagined, these unexpected and unwitting connections bringing out the surprising and fantastical, the funny and the strange. The object may appear illogical, yet delightful, taking on a life of its own, a second life, as it becomes animated with a character which is a reflection of everyday experiences. We become intrigued with the possibilities that everyday things can take on. Far from being a flight from reality, storytelling constitutes the deepening of our relationship to it.

In amplifying the incidental in our everyday lives, we may begin to see the strangely familiar and the familiarly strange, affording us to look at our everyday world afresh, rethinking our attitude to that which we take for granted or seemed all too comfortable with, questioning the limits of what is possible and perhaps come face to face with a moment of revelation.

Methodology.
The methodology is an evolving process that makes use of games/devices/storytelling to explore creative possibilities when everyday moments becomes significant beginnings in the act of creating.

There are two parts to the project.

Part 1: A passport for the traveller.
Part 1 is an invitation to all to participate in ‘A journey to Strange•R World’. Participants are referred to as ‘travellers’. The focused act of mapping a day’s journey, and in the process engaging with strangers, may for a moment return the traveller to the consciousness of the everyday. In this game, with instructions and guides, the traveller is issued a ‘passport’ to be filled in with notes from an everyday. One of the task is to fill in their wishes. This wish of the traveller will eventually form the story that leads to the everyday object, which is chosen by the strangers that the travellers meet, given a second life.

Part 2 grows out of Part 1. The notes contributed by the travellers in Part 1 will be used to build Part 2 which is the space of the installation and the assemblage of transformed objects

From text to built form.
Part 2: A certificate for a second life.

The journey that is mapped out by each traveller in the passport will consequently be intepreted into elements that will shape the installation. The passports will form the spatial construct that will set the stage for Part 2, the objects to be given a second life, as a second group of collaborators, called the object translators are given the tasks of translating the wishes of the travellers in the passport onto the everyday object. As more wishes are translated and stories begin to form, the landscape will begin to fill with surprising characterisations of the renewed objects. Each object tells a story. The installation begins to grow and transform with the stories of the everyday. These are the stories of the city and everday is a unique one.

Deriving at Strange•R.
The outcome of the object is the effort of the traveller with the assortment of strangers, and the object translator. The object comes about from the questions asked to strangers. The effect is that as the traveller becomes familiar with the stranger, this encounter results in the familiar object becoming strange in the process of having the traveller’s wish translated onto the stranger’s object. Hence the object is called Strange•R, dreived from the word stranger.

Second life.
Perhaps there is a wish to be something else, to be doing something beyond what this reality can afford each of us at this moment. We know it exists in our recesses which sometimes we express it in hope or desperation. What about objects that we abandon, leave in a corner, or simply bored with? Now we will see them renewed, re-living in all kinds of interpretations. As these objects are given a chance to have a second life, the design process is documented in the form of a certificate.