16moments: my tangible sidebar (Just Bru)

16moments: my tangible sidebar0

Posted by Bru May 1, 2006 3:23 PM

When I rented this flat in London, I found this bookcase as part of its furnishing.

I have been thinking about it for a while: on one side I'm no special IKEA fan, essentially because, even if I recognize some nice designs there, I feel it's quite difficult to give character to a house fully built around lego-like, all-too recognizable items.
On the other side, I wasn't so comfortable with the idea of getting rid of a bonus piece of furniture, so I started considering a new way of employing it.
In the end, the solution was to use it as an "inspirational" display: 16 items as 16 moments for 16 concepts and ideas.
Ladies and gentleman, 16moments was born!

It's no rocket science and definitely is something you can DIY whenever you want, the only requirement is some well defined, polished and possibly isolated shelf or display. As for my 16moments, it's a 150x150, black, "16 boxes" frame, and is the only piece of furniture in a 4 meters wide wall. That is enough to catch my attention when I'm around.
As for the moments themselves, at any given time each space is dedicated to a concept or item I'm interested in (or obsessed by) at the moment, and will be used to keep me focused or to give my guests an idea "at a glance" of my current context. Much like a sidebar in a blog ;)
As direct consequences:
. It won't be always full (at the time of this writing only 5 spaces have been used).
. It won't stay the same for long (e.g. I hope the "currently reading" space will change quite often ;) ).

The idea I was pursuing here is moving away from the traditional idea of bookshelf, where you just store all the items or symbols that connects you to specific (hopefully good) moments / moods and keep just the ones essential for your "here and now", and only for the essential amount of time (then they can go back to ordinary bookshelves).
You can think of it as a fancy kind of whiteboard, where instead of drawing or writing notes and sketches, you put items (and maybe those same sketches, but nicely written on a cute and properly folded piece of paper).

Finally, as I mentioned above, 16moments also has a virtual counterpart in the blogosphere. This is open to anyone who's just curious to peek at my context or want to comment or contribute to it. You can also follow the tag 16moments on flickr or subscribe to the moments feed via feedburner.

As for your unspoken question: Yes, this is what happens when you spend too much time wondering about inspirational landscapes, kaizen and context catching :P