Manscaping

The object was printed on vellum paper so that you can see both sides of the printed page. The “inside” of the interface design is seen registered and printed on the verso side of the page.

Manscaping is an exploration of online forums as archives of information. There were several similarities I noticed between different forum boards such as greetings for new members, asking personal questions, and providing niche insight regarding the forum topic. I had to narrow down the content since forums comprise such a diverse range of content. I chose two forums: one about lawn care and one about balding. Both had similar demographics of men above the age of 25 yet the content was very different.

For the final piece I wanted to highlight these similarities in forum culture; I decided to juxtapose topics from one forum with replies from the other while hiding which forum each post came from. It was up to the viewer to understand that something was amiss when a question regarding which razor to use was answered with opinions on certain weed-whackers. The object became a book laid out to mimic an early computer interface such as Xerox Star. The versos of each page became the back of the ‘screen’ displayed on the recto to show self awareness of the paper medium.

The question from one forum is paired with responses from the other forum.