The Spherical Book

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Hither Yon (@hitheryon) is a design collective founded in 2011 by @hansikhouse, @voronoi, @arete and @erb. The first project that kicked off our years of collaboration was a travel grant proposal investigating a fictional object we called a spherical book. The idea sounds quite strange upon first reading, but the spherical book was a means to an end for us, a means to talk about the interconnectedness of all design, and the effect a single object can have upon the built environment. Imagine if humans discovered that it made more sense to transmit information through a spherical book instead of the usual rectangular book. How would this effect the design of a bookshelf, and subsequently, how would that effect the shape of the walls that bookshelves rest against, and how would the adapted walls effect the shape of the buildings as a whole, and how would the transformation of architecture effect the organization of streets and the form of the city itself. The domino effect of a singular discovery has the potential to transform entire cities, language, writing, education, even human interaction. Our grant proposal involved comparing the effects the spherical book would have if discovered in both Berlin and Rome, since those two cities have such intensely different approaches to the idea of change. We used the concept of the spherical book to explore this theory of interconnectedness, and it inspired many of the concepts and methods of collaboration that we employed in all of our work to follow. I still think of the spherical book as one of the most intriguing and fascinating concepts we've ever investigated as a collective, and I believe it will find its way into our projects for many years to come.

(Above illustration by @hansikhouse in 2011 for our grant proposal)

Our First Solo Exhibition

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Before flying to Berlin in September of 2011, the four of us decided to organize an exhibition of preliminary studies of the spherical book concept at Hartell Gallery in Ithaca, New York. Since we spent the summer apart, the explorations we displayed were mostly individual creations stemming from our collective idea. Below is the exhibition poster I designed to greet people as they entered the gallery space. The poster includes our short introductory description of the spherical book project, which makes clear the sense of wonder and curiosity we all felt in walking down this new path together.

The Discovery

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As one of my contributions to The Spherical Book exhibition, I created a very simple animation to represent the crucial moment of discovery. One of the things I liked most about this entire project was how simple the idea is at its heart - we find the spherical book, we place it on the shelf, it rolls off the shelf, we find the spherical book, we place it on the shelf, it rolls off the shelf. After this cycle goes on and on, the logical next step is to consider redesigning the bookshelf to incorporate this new spherical design, and so on and so forth.

The Drawings

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The majority of the works presented at the inaugural Spherical Book exhibition were works of ink on paper. I will go more in depth into the digital drawings that I created for this exhibition in future posts, but below you will find four zoomed in images, one of each of our contributions to the exhibition.

Spherical Book studies by @arete
ink on paper

Spherical Book studies by @hansikhouse
ink on paper

Spherical Book studies by @voronoi
ink on paper

Spherical Book studies by @erb
giclée print

Scenes from the Show

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@hitheryon in September 2011
(left to right: @hansikhouse, @erb, @arete and @voronoi)

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Thanks for reading!
Let me know what you think of this concept in the comments below.