After a morning discussion with Ian Anderson, founder of the Sheffield based design studioDesigners Republic, a group of us (Sheffield Hallam final year graphic design students) were given the task of performing something completely pointless for an hour and to document our findings.
Examples of pointless tasks given were throwing a penny over a balcony every minute, riding the bus to a destination of no importance and back, and sharpening pencils for 60 minutes. All very pointless to a degree.
The task I thought up involved filling in the counters of every letter (well, the ones with counters) from a article I found on Design Observer entitled "Malcolm Gladwell is #Wrong" which makes reference to Twitter. I chose this article simply because it was the newest one added. This turned out to be more of a laborious task than I had first anticipated, I documented my progress by photographing it every 5 minutes.
We are to make a 10 minute presentation tomorrow afternoon, with the aim to convince the rest of the group that the task completed was in fact utterly pointless. I'm not sure at the moment what this will achieve, but as the overall theme is based on communication I expect it will improve our presentation skills and out ability to "sell" our ideas to clients.
My findings from this experiment concluded that after 60 minutes of filling in the counters I covered 48 lines of type, I filled in a total of 1246 letter counters, there was an average of 26 counters per line and finally that both my wrist and eyes ached after.
