Everyday Experiments

Tech has been used to explore land, ocean and space for centuries. But what about the home? As the houses we live in become our entire lives - work, play, family and more - we now have the chance to investigate the new ways that tech can help evolve our homes in a post-coronavirus landscape.

The notion of home exploration is at the very heart of Ikea’s latest design project. Space10, the homeware brand’s design and research lab, has enlisted a group of innovative design and technology studios to foresee how tech can change the way we engage with our homes moving forward. Through a series of 18 digital prototypes, the studios have designed a host of weird and imaginative concepts, ranging from a speaker that visualises sound on the surfaces around it, to a giant inflatable elephant that expands to fit any interior space. Posted on EverydayExperiments.com, the designs seek to spark discussion about how AI, AR and VR can shape the future of our homes.

Hold Still

The Duchess of Cambridge and the National Portrait Gallery have challenged the nation with an ambitious community project to capture this unique moment of the world’s history on a personal level.

The project, Hold Still, encourages the public to engage with photography by capturing portraits of the UK at this time, creating a collective ‘portrait of our nation’ to reflect ‘resilience and bravery, humour and sadness, creativity and kindness, human tragedy and hope’. The Duchess hopes the project will capture the ‘spirit, mood, hopes, fears and feelings’ of our nation as we fight the Coronavirus whilst also using photography and creativity to bring people together, afar.

The project is free and open to all, regardless of ability. Each image will be assessed on the emotion and experience it conveys rather than its technical expertise. The gallery will shortlist 100 portraits which will feature in a virtual exhibition on their website.

We All Stand Together

Eight year old Rollo Jensen’s art highlights that no matter how old you are you can still do your bit to help those suffering through the Covid-19 pandemic.

Jensen has created artworks in the style of various famous artists he is inspired by, but with an added pandemic twist. He plans to compile the completed works into a Coronavirus themed charity exhibition that will raise money for The Trussell Trust's Help the Hungry campaign. The trust aims to help those struggling to put food on the table thanks to Covid-19, supporting a nationwide network of UK foodbanks. Rollo's ambition was to raise £1,000 for them, however he has already far exceeded that target and now plans to keep creating pieces and hold an exhibition to sell them once lockdown ends.

Works include We All Stand Together, a toilet paper collage inspired by Peter Blake and Damien Hirst; Thank You, inspired by Tracey Emin; Two Metres Please, in the style of Keith Haring; Ride It Out And Flatten The Curve –­ based on Banksy and Bridget Riley; What A Mess, inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Stop Moaning Lisa, in tribute to Leonardo Da Vinci. There's also Mayhem, of Gerhard Richter fame, and Coronavirus is Pure Evil, inspired by Pure Evil.

Isolation on the Streets of London

Photographer Chris Dorley-Brown has been documenting the streets of London since the 1980’s, meticulously piecing together life through images and creating an archive of the London Borough of Hackney. Since lockdown this life has been taken off the street, creating an altered urban landscape that has allowed Chris to photograph spaces which were previously bustling with Londoners. His unique process of photography brings together multiple exposures into one, a simultaneous snapshot of events that happened over an hour. This process has been brought into his recent work but instead of individuals going about their daily business his streetscapes are completely devoid of life. The final scenes express an eerie stillness which is both “terrifying and exciting in equal measure”. Chris’s images are sure to play an important role in remembering these months, when we look back with enough time between us and the lockdown to understand its impact.