The Living Archives

The Living Archives project is about gathering, preserving, and sharing the stories of Mecklenburg County residents who navigated the COVID-19 virus. Begun in 2021, the project was re-launched in Spring 2022 with a renewed understanding that the COVID-19 experience was on-going and complex. The project was designed with an equity lens, focusing predominantly on Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous voices often excluded from archives. Over 350 neighbors shared their experiences in audio-visual interviews, poetry, art and written pieces and all of these narratives are available on YouTube and, beginning in June, in perpetuity at the digital Spangler Robinson Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. This project had me overseeing the structural design and translation of Living Archives, including the logo, pictures, and display text for each individual featured within the Mecklenburg Library onto my dielines. The project's goals were to create a display that: -Has a visually unique design that can be viewed from all angles. -Features clear breaks in the structural design to visually separate different information panels in a 3D space. -Is easy to move with tear-down features for reusability.

My inspiration for the design came from the Art Tower Mito, with its many triangular faces. It fit perfectly within the guidelines given by Living Archives. A non-traditional geometric shape within corrugated with clear visual breaks, when laid flat for a die line, was simple enough to minimize corrugated waste, scalable to any size, and easy to assemble.

For ease of movement and reusability requirements, the display was cut into two pieces and fastened back together with Velcro straps instead of traditional glue, so the pieces could be separated after assembly.

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