🎮 Game of the month

Trust is perhaps one of the greatest tenets of a stable, secure relationship. But the scary part is that it takes a while to build, and just a few minutes to destroy (and no, we are not speaking from experience 🥲). Well, you can delve into this exact topic with The Evolution of Trust, a 30-minute interactive game that shows us the mechanisms behind trust, and why being suspicious might actually be detrimental in the long run.

🏛️ Exhibition of the month 

Long gone are the days in which design is just about “what looks pretty”, or “what works”. Or, perhaps those days never existed… Indeed, design has always emerged from a complex, symbiotic relationship with the world around it - especially today with the ecological and geopolitical challenges we now face, matter matters. Simply said. Oh, and that’s also the title of the new permanent exhibition at the Barcelona Museum of Design: a wide panorama of current and past design pieces and how they’ve grown and interacted with the world and systems around. Also a chance to see one of our earlier works, included as part of the exhibit. Stay tuned until the end of the newsletter to find out which one!

📈 Data visualization of the month

Did you know we'll spend a whopping 32,098 hours of our life eating - almost four years? That's longer than the average romantic relationship. Food really is like a significant other, changing with the seasons and our moods. The Rhythm of Food visualization captures this delicious relationship perfectly: Moritz Stefaner and the Google News Lab analyzed 15 years of food-related Google searches and plotted them on a year clock, revealing when we collectively crave everything from pumpkin spice to watermelon. Did you know about chokecherries? Neither did we - but they're there too!

📝 Data story of the month

It’s no news that the world of fan-fiction is a rich and layered repository of desire, creativity and social narrative. Therefore, there is a lot to analyze - for instance, “ships” (no, not 🚢- it’s when fans imagine two characters to be together) are more than just imaginary relationships: they reveal fascinating cultural and gender dynamics. As demonstrated in this data story by the Pudding, a data-driven analysis of the mechanisms within fanfictions and ships, looking at AO3, one of the largest fan-fiction sites in the world.

⚒️ Prototype of the month

We've all gotten used to bossing around our voice assistants, haven't we? "Alexa, what's the weather?" "Siri, set a timer!" Home Shrine flips this dynamic on its head. Designer Yosuke Ushigome's 2018 prototype creates a more spiritual relationship with our digital helpers, where weather predictions come as mysterious oracle pronouncements rather than matter-of-fact forecasts. Intrigued? Check out this Elisava Masters’ Talk from November to hear more about Yosuke’s work in design & creative tech.

And just like that, this month’s newsletter has come to an end. As a reward for reading it till here, this is the installation that is included as part of Matter Matters: our 2015 sand clocks placed in the CCCB museum in Barcelona to track viewer interest in the artworks of an exhibition! Talk about a throwback…

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, 

From those who craft poetry through the spreadsheet xx