The impetus for this project came in the form of a vast, and largely untapped, collection of personal memorabilia my family inherited from the estate of my late grandmother, Dottie. While Dottie passed away in August of 2008, she spent the bulk of her 81 years collecting and preserving not only her own letters, photographs, and ephemera, but those of her own mother and grandmother as well. When she passed away, we were suddenly presented with the monumental task of sorting through dozens and dozens of haphazardly organized cartons of personal effects.

To me they represent not only a deeply personal connection to the women in my family, but also a large collection of historic objects that can be researched, sorted, and ultimately curated. Living on the opposite side of the country, however, has left me feeling geographically and emotionally disconnected from the task of exploring this collection.

This sense of disconnection -- a growing trend among most of my generation -- has been the motivation behind some of my thesis research. Believing that graphic design has a role in creating and defining space and place, I was inspired to create a project that could allow me to transcend physical space, and, through the generation of a collective history, not just evoke a sense of place, but also create it.

The project is framed by four basic structures:

Two boxes.
To create the structure of this project, I requested that my family select two boxes from my grandmother's apartment that they had not personally looked through or sorted, but that they could reasonably assume held personal memorabilia (and not, for example, old towels). One went to my mother, and one was shipped to me.

This part of the project is intended to not only insert a form of chance operation into what is otherwise a pretty rigid system, but in an abstract way allow the hand of my grandmother herself -- the last person to touch the contents of the box -- to have impact on the final outcome.

Two people.
The narrative for this project will come from two primary voices: myself and my mother, with supporting additions and comments from three generations of family members, as well as any friends of my grandmother.

Two spaces.
The space being transcended in this project is, of course, the geographic location of its main participants: Dallas, TX, and Providence, RI. More abstractly, though, this project is about transcending generations, using a uniquely modern tool to collect a uniquely historic set of objects.

Two weeks.
Understanding the sheer bulk of stuff taken out of my grandmother's apartment after she passed away, I was distinctly aware that this once-a-day, "collective unpacking" could potentially continue on ad finitum without a very rigid set of contraints. Since my ultimate goal is to generate a selected collection based on chance -- not a comprehensive archive -- I have put in a time limit to give a concrete beginning and end to the experiment.

One history.
Over the course of the two week project, each participant will take one item out of their box each day. Each new post will contain the beginnings of a description of the object -- where its from, who it belonged to, why it was saved, etc. This initial post is not static, but is open to collective editing and commenting by a wide net of relatives and friends connected to this part of my family.

The ultimate result -- a collection of 28 distinct objects or groups, along with their stories -- will not only be a portrait of the woman who collected them, but a more nuanced understanding of place in the online world.