Do you know Jonathan Harris ?
Posted on October 27, 2012 | posted by:
Iwould like to present you today, someone who inspired me a lot and who has a huge talent : Jonathan Harris.
JH consider itself a storyteller. He is interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the world. « I do this because i think that people actually have a lot in common. I think people are very similar, but i also think that we have trouble seeing that. » « We have a lot in common : one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves »
JH created a tool : We Feel Fine. This is a pièce that every two or three minutes scans the world’s newlyposted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases « i feel » or « i am feeling ». This website is just increadible ! WE FEEL FINE
I invite you to watch the video where JH explain his project: The TED talk, Jonathan Harris, the Web’s secret stories
JH is a perfect exemple of someone who understood the inscredible power of internet, who use it cleverly to create tools who change our world vision. Its projects are full of poetry, with simple concept and beautiful interface, they cause more thinking than a thousand words. In my opinion, JH represent the new generation of designer, capable to use the new cybernote’s practices smartly to create matter to reflection and interaction.
The thematic of identity is omnipresent in his work… It’s a key subject in our society which evolve so fast, with an individualization stronger and stronger but with the eternal need to express oneself.
He consider himself as an artist, but he is a real designer in the way he create coherence from the chaos, and of course the way he propose attractive interface give meaning to his intention.
– An other TED video about his work
– Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience. Cowbird is experimenting with a new form of participatory journalism, allowing people from all over the world to collaborate in documenting the overarching “sagas” that affect our lives today.
The Whale Hunt is a storytelling experiment. JH explore here new way to document an experience.
” In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. I documented their traditional whale hunt with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, taken at five-minute intervals for seven days, and at even higher frequencies in moments of high adrenaline. This established a constant “photographic heartbeat” that more or less matched the changing pace of my own heartbeat, and which recorded every moment of the hunt. I then developed a framework for experiencing this story, allowing the viewer to rearrange the photographic elements of the story to extract multiple sub-stories focused around different people, places, topics, and other variables.”
