on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
I seem to have gotten into the habit of writing a long design essay every year.
https://medium.com/@bruces/ancient-everyday-weirdness-591955f40a2d
This design essay is part of a series, including “The Homemade Limits of Everyday Weirdness” and “Some Public Limits of Everyday Weirdness.” I release these essays on New Year’s Day.
My two earlier essays were about weird domestic arrangements. This one concerns weird everyday objects.
“Every Day Carry” is a lifestyle native to the 21st century. This hobby was directly named after “the everyday.” “Every Day Carry” concerns tools, toys and/or utensils which somebody, somehow, feels obliged to lug around on their own person. All the time. Every Day.
“Weird Everyday Carry” is a niche even more intriguing to me, because it combines my abiding interests in the oxymoronic, the everyday, and the weird. How weird is everyday weird? What are the limits to weirdness? How long has this weirdness been going on?
That term-of-art “Every Day Carry” is a neologism from digital social media, but the weirdness is prehistoric. The term-of-art from archaeology would be “manuport.” A “manuport” is some hand-carried knick-knack, a small shiny object, commonly a pretty rock, that somebody saw and grasped. They picked it up, by hand, and lugged it a long distance, just because they were happy to look at it, and they wanted it in their hand….