100-day repetitive project 26 February, 2011

@kottke linked this  [article] this past week, and it got me craving to undertake a hundred day repetitive project. Michael Bierut, senior critic in graphic design at Yale D-School, gives his graduate students this basic assignment:

Beginning Thursday, October 21, 2010, do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day. Do it every day between today and up to and including Friday, January 28, 2011, the last day of the project, by which time you will have done the operation one hundred times. That afternoon, each student will have up to 15 minutes to present his or her one-hundred part project to the class.

The only restrictions on the operation you choose is that it must be repeated in some form every day, and that every iteration must be documented for eventual presentation. The medium is open, as is the final form of the presentation on the 100th day.

What a fantastic project! It teaches you to keep pushing and just produce. There will be days when you just can't for the life of you do one more thing, but if you know that the next day you'll be doing something new, though in the same vein, there is a kind of succinctness to the current project and an opportunity to reinvent the next day.

I'm toying with a few ideas:

• 100 different book covers from 100 different stores/apts/libraries/etc
• 100 daily lego sculpture
• meet 100 new people and take a picture with them
• 100 photographs of street art: graffiti, stickers, various awesomeness
• resurrect my "how many __________ does it take to change a lightbulb" jokes

Or I might just steal the wildly enjoyable idea of Ely Kim: 100 days, 100 songs, 100 locations, 100 dances.

I'm making a decision tomorrow and starting on Monday. Let me know if you want to do something too and we can set final dates together!