do you ever dream about work?

Custom keyboard mapping for efficient design practice.

Practice-led artistic research into the 21st century phenomenon of the graphic designer. I held graphic design in my hands using ethnography, toolmaking and performance as research methods. I examined how designers spend their time in everyday life, this designer, me, as well as you, what are we doing? What are our worldviews, belief systems, mythologies and ideologies?

Keylogging research. I recorded the buttons a graphic designer (me) presses while working, as an autoethnographic research method into what exactly it is that designers do. To celebrate this labour, I then used a pen plotter to make a series of posters. Three minutes of the designers keypresses took about eight hours to plot. October 24th 2023.

I cut my thumb so every time I type i can feel it in my nerve endings. Not true, it’s my left thumb so I don’t type with it. Not true, I feel it anyway. Why are most of the function keys on the left of the keyboard. What’s so functional about pressing buttons. Stephen Kerr is a designer and musician based in. Have you ever loved an instrument? The Ctrl key broke like four times since I moved here. I have one more replacement because I bought a bunch of them but at some point I gave up and use an external keyboard. I dunno I’m more confused than ever. It was something to do with dreams and working. It’s the middle of the night I’m writing this on my phone. If I had a dream this is when I would be writing it. The memory is fuzzy: either I don’t remember or it didn’t make sense in the first place. It was something to do with fuzziness and memory no wait. Phones don’t have keyboards in real life this doesn’t make sense. I’m trying to type but I don’t think I can get it on the way to the office for the weekend and I think it was a good idea to do it and I was thinking about you and I was thinking of you and I was thinking about you and I was in the same place as a friend of mine and I was in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the

Email answering performance using Google’s Gmail service. To reveal the work of the designer clearly, I performed the designer’s task of answering email in front of an audience. Due to the performance happening at 7pm, out of office hours, there was extensive use of the Scheduled Email feature. Some stories emerged about our precarity including overdue rent and invalid payment information for Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions. Leeszaal, Rotterdam, November 7th 2023.

A performative tool that measures the laziness of the designer as they work and graphs it on a pen plotter. The less the designer uses the mouse, the longer a line the pen plotter draws, it creates a record of the tiny moments between the work.

Secondly, during my studies at XPUB, I plan to combine different strands of my practices (design, music, programming, theatre). Being a designer is an important part of my identity, and I am keen to make work true to who I am.

Excerpt from xpub application letter, March 15th 2022.

Re-enacting dreams about work at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Participants use felt dolls to tell stories of our dreams on the small and squishy stage. We’re trying to balance design labour with other labour like making food for our loved ones, we can’t stop brushing our teeth, brushing, brushing, brushing. February 5th 2024.

Collective dream re-enactment at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz, Austria. Inside a tent, a group of people perform eachother’s dreams about work and discuss and analyse them together. We feel like impostors, we don’t know how to work these machines, we’re going to crash. March 11th 2024.

do you ever dream about work? Online research and publication where we shared our dreams, worries, rants, designs. The answers to the question are published together as a collection of voices.

Keyboard of things designers have said. Our feelings about work.