Significant packaging & “design fiction”

I mentioned that I’d have a couple of bits of news from the Significant Objects project that might be of interest to Murketing readers. Here’s one bit.

Today’s story (part of our Paola Antonelli team up, co-published on Core77) is by Matt Brown. I’ve mentioned him a couple of times here in the past; a post on Metafilter described him as a “design fiction enthusiast,” which sounded close enough to my interest in imaginary brands that I was curious. And his work just completely blows me away: He has a peculiar genius for devising alternative histories for random, mass-produced stuff, and expressing this design fiction with both words and, more unusually, completely invented packaging. (In fact he’s now doing a series for Core77, Design Fancy.)

We knew we wanted him involved in Significant Objects. And when Paola Antonelli presented me with her objects, there was one that struck me as being perfect for Brown. This:

What is it? Well, Anotelli wouldn’t tell me. Turns out Brown, as I suspected, had an answer. It’s a “crumpter.”

A crumpter, it turns out, is a sort of analog precedent to autotune. Never heard of that? Oh, well then, please read the story over at S.O.

And yes, all the collateral material Brown created is part of the auction.

We’ve sold a mystery object, we’ve sold a story that was itself an object, and now an object whose story is told in part through its packaging.