Clarisa Diaz
Clarisa Diaz is an interdisciplinary designer based in NYC. In 2007, she began her career as a Fulbright scholar in Architecture and has since evolved her practice to designing tools including books, toolkits, web features and other interactive experiences. Her work has been shown at the Chilean Institute of Culture, Shanghai Biennale, Queens Museum, and SUPERFRONT; with work featured in the Parsons Journal of Design Strategies, Core77, Asia LIFE and Mind Design. She has worked at Newsweek & The Daily Beast, Penguin Books, and is currently the Senior Design Research Fellow at NYPL Labs.
Sonder, A Story
A transmedia narrative about identifying with people on our periphery
This project addresses how human connections can be made through everyday experiences. We encounter people randomly or sometimes have contact with someone on a regular basis but fail to know who they are. The term 'sonder', from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, encompasses the realization that every passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. This story reveals the narratives of liminal figures among four people in a neighborhood in Queens, NY. These people are an art student (the author), a taxi driver from Bangladesh, a laundry lady from Mexico, and a Chinese couple running a 99cent store. All figures unknowingly lead interconnected lives until their conversations lead them to discover connections in the same community.
The formats of the story are a written web documentary, print artifacts including tickets and receipts that are the reminisce of brief encounters, and physical mechanisms reflective of the services that hold the print artifacts. While technology brings new possibilities for connections, or i
