This post was first published on Architizer in an effort to raise funds for the project through Kickstarter.
Last year, when my friend Yuri asked for my help as an architect, my response was, “Absolutely.”
The project wasn’t a building, but an installation, and in order to make it happen, we wouldn’t be presenting to a client — we would be appealing to a larger community for their support by creating a Kickstarter campaign.
The premise of the installation is straightforward: Our goal is to elevate awareness around cancer by creating an experience that everyone can share, and we’ve designed a proposal for a multimedia installation that will take place in New York City this October, which is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Click here to check out the campaign, and read on for the full story.
The story behind Notes to a Friend: The Experience is a bit more complex and a lot more personal.
Yuri is a graphic designer who was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in 2010 while I was in my first semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After a year of aggressive treatment, she was declared cancer-free. Heading into her fifth year of remission in 2015, her cancer came back in the form of Stage 4 breast cancer and had metastasized to her lungs, bones and brain. There is no cure for metastatic cancer. It is something she lives with every day.
““Nowadays, there isn’t a person you meet who hasn’t been affected by cancer in one way or another … but it’s still a taboo subject in our culture. Most people have a naive understanding of what ‘cancer’ entails: chemo, hair loss, death. But what about everything in between?””
Just prior to her cancer’s recurrence, Yuri had begun to write a series of “notes” that were reflections on her experience with cancer. When the cancer returned, she felt a sense of urgency like never before to share her story and started to post these notes on Instagram. She called this project Notes to a Friend, and the response was overwhelming. What began as a way of coping with her own trauma was helping to create connections within a larger community of those who have also been affected by cancer and support those who were going through similar experiences of their own.
At the outset of 2016, Yuri knew she wanted to bring Notes to a Friend to a larger audience and continue to connect people through it in a meaningful way. She wasn’t sure exactly what it would be, but she knew that it would be in New York and that it would use technology.
I was onboard, but I also knew that I wasn’t the person to convincingly pull off anything related to technology in this way. This is when we approached Space Craft, a creative technology studio comprised of Jason Tucker and Mike Degen that specializes in creating transformative experiences. I was lucky enough to have become friends with Jason and Mike while at the GSD and knew they would be amazing to collaborate with. Luckily they said yes, and they have brought an invaluable perspective at the intersection of the digital and physical realms, both having studied architecture prior to entering the Master of Design Technology program at school.
the process
As we began to collaborate, we had no idea what the proposal would become, but we knew that we wanted to create something that would bring people together through Yuri’s notes. It would be an experience that is grounded in physical space and augmented by technology, and we knew if anything else that we wanted to avoid using technology simply for technology’s sake.
We were able to land on the key elements of the proposal early on: audio of the notes, letterpressing and projection mapping. Over the past year and a half, we would meet over weekly Hangouts (we’re all in different cities) and continued to iterate, prototype and refine the proposal, taking it as far as we could on our own.
The Proposal
Combining both digital and physical elements, Notes to a Friend: The Experience brings to life the deeper themes embedded in Yuri’s notes.
Originally posted as short reflections on Yuri’s Instagram, the notes will be letterpressed as large format prints and mounted on the walls in the space. They will be blind-debossed, which means the words will be pressed into the paper without ink. While they will still be able to be read, the idea is that they are not “activated” until the audio of the actual note being read is heard in the space.
Sound becomes light, and light becomes the conductor of space, guiding people through the notes.