After the success of our make-it-yourself catalogue for last year’s Jerwood show ‘an experiment in collaboration’ (featured in the Creative Review annual, Design Week Awards runner up and winner of a Platinum award at Graphis) we were asked to make a catalogue for Jerwood’s latest show: Laboratory.

The Laboratory is an experiment: three artists take over the gallery and, starting from nothing, build a show as they go – a totally unpredictable process, with no way of knowing what the work will be like from one day to the next. Everything they do exposed to scrutiny and comment, from the resident writer and photographer to the public and press.

With an experimental show that is one big work in progress we set out to make a catalogue in the true spirit of the show: unpredictable, exposed and experimental. We decided not to design a catalogue. Instead we designed a process,  a way of creating a catalogue that we couldn’t predict and couldn’t control, a way of gathering and documenting everything that happens in the show in real time, built, like the show, in the gallery itself, and only finished as the show closes. We’ve just let it unfold…

Blog
The process started with the Laboratory blog. The artists, curator, writer, resident photographer and designers posted real-time updates on the show to the blog which also automatically draws in related content from external sites like twitter and flickr. Each post has a print option which we use to output content in real time for the printed catalogue. Every post prints the size it appears in the blog, so no two pages are alike.

Catalogue
Each day’s posts are added to the catalogues which are on display in the gallery so you can see the them growing as the  show grows. Posts are joined vertically to make one continuous chronological document. The catalogue kept growing right up until the moment the laboratory closed its doors.

The Office Games poster produced for Richard House Children’s Hospice to advertise their new fund-raising event in the City, won in the Poster category. The innovative edible-henna-tattooed Indian sausages; Mr.Singh’s Bangras, won in the Branded Packaging category. The utterly charming website for, small London cleaning company, www.eagleclean.co.uk also ‘cleaned up’ with a win in the Digital Design – Commercial category. Along with the three wins, The Collaborative Art Catalogue for the Jerwood Foundation received a commendation in the Print Design category; the Deloitte News Wall was shortlisted in the Digital Design – Information category and both The Connaught and Wolf Theiss also made the shortlist for the Identity Programmes category.

A busy night all round. We’d also like to issue a big congratulations to our client The National Gallery who were inaugurated into the Design Week Hall of Fame. Congratulations!

The event, ‘An Experiment in Collaboration’, was designed to explore the creations that would evolve from non-traditional collaborations. Jerwood invited 6 artists to participate in the experiment, who were then free to select who they would like to collaborate with. The chosen collaborators ranged from an architect to a computer games designer and even a biophysicist. They then all displayed the results of their collaborations.

The catalogue that we produced to accompany the event was the final collaboration of the show: if visitors wanted a catalogue, they had to make it themselves. Huge B1 sized sheets of paper were accompanied by a simple instruction sheet detailing how to cut, fold and bind, and use the varying tools laid on in the gallery to create their own unique catalogue. The result was 1000 unique catalogues.

Here are some pictures from the event and some of the catalogues that were created: