Tiny Paper House Covers Laptop Webcam
We are used to experiencing life through digital filters and largely take them for granted (no pun intended). This playful student design project uses a few sheets of paper to rethink one now-classic mode of real-time and online communication.
Ryuji Nakamura, cut, glued and pasted a small white home on her personal laptop as part of a design exhibition. Looking inside, one becomes part of the installation – a giant peering through tiny windows into a modestly-furnished home.
This is not the first time this designer has worked with paper, but definitely a convincing conceptual project amidst many larger-scale paper art pieces.
The project is called “Dwarf + Giant.”
“This is the architecture designed for the workshop held at the design event ‘DESIGNEAST 2010’ in Osaka. The concept of the workshop is that the designers and the architects design a product that the participant can easily assemble there and the drawings of them are exhibited, and participant buys the one favorite drawing of them and the materials to make it and assemble them there and take it home.”
“I designed the small paper house standing on the computer monitor. When you set up the house to cover the lens of the CCD camera on your computer monitor and activate the camera using a software like “Photo Booth”, the inside of the house is displayed on the monitor and you can see yourself looking inside behind the window. Yourself who are outside of the house and yourself who are inside of the house overlap, and you can feel you become small and big at the same time.”
Nakamura’s work (and that of her firm) often incorporates somewhat ephemeral materials such as paper, cardboard and string, like an installation of hanging ribbons obscuring racks of garments, a draped door installation for Shiseido made of beaded necklaces and a folding origami-like cardboard structure made for the atelier of Japanese designer ISSEY MIYAKE. See them all at Nakamura’s website.
