Lo-fi Magic, Design, and Paper Planetariums

Session highlights on the MAX Blog are an opportunity for the MAX team to tell you about hidden gems – sessions that you may not be aware of and don’t want to miss out on.

Join Kelli Anderson as she explains the ideas, process, and tools behind her delightful paper contraptions and stop-motion animations. Learn how a tinkering approach can help lead designers to creative solutions — as they think with their hands to solicit feedback from their materials.

This session will explore how designers’ unique sensitivities can be used to create work that seems like magic, while challenging their audience’s expectations about the material world.

Kelli Anderson is a designer and paper engineer who uses humble materials to expose invisible forces at play in the world. Obsessed with the transparency and intimacy offered by “ lo-fi magic” , she believes that handheld experiences can effectively subvert our expectations about how the larger world works. Kelli’s work includes original and award-winning projects for Tinybop, NPR, The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Times, and The American Museum of Natural History—as well as her redesign of brands such asRuss & Daughters, momofuku, and Munchery. Additionally, she once made a paper record player wedding invitation and a counterfeit NY Times newspaper from the “utopian future” (a 2008 Yes Men hoax, for which they won an Ars Electronica Award.) She was Adobe’s first Creative Resident in 2015. This Fall, Chronicle is releasing her pop-up book, This Book is a Planetarium, a collection of functional paper contraptions that demonstrate how technology can work when pared-down to its bare minimum. It includes a tiny paper planetarium, among other minimalist devices.