S02/ ECO’S CHAMBER: THE LIFE AND IDEAS OF UMBERTO ECO

Eco’s Chamber / 2019
Poster Outcomes: One of the many forms that were derived
from the poster generating tool.
Year: Spring 2019
Typology: Website
Size: 1080 x 720 px
Typology: Website
Size: 1080 x 720 px
Tools: Sketch, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS
Typefaces: Haas Unica by Monotype
Typefaces: Haas Unica by Monotype
A web-based poster generating tool to celebrate the ideas of the late Italian semiotician, philosopher, and novelist, Umberto Eco.
The first day of spring 2019 began with an interesting exercise: refer to the New York Times’ On This Day section and choose one event that you will use as the basis of your work for the next month. As chance would have it, it was the two year death anniversary of Umberto Eco.
Like other preeminent thinkers of our time, Eco too had some overarching concepts that pervaded his vast repertoire of work. His fascination with fakes and hyperreality, the innate human affinity for conspiracies and tribalism, and the allure of utopianism all made repeated appearances in his publications.
In an attempt to impart Eco’s ideas in a form that would serve as a counterpart to his books, I designed a website that enabled users to read about a specific idea of his with a poster generator on the side. That way, each user could take part in the learning process and take back a piece of that learning through a poster.




Eco spoke of four cultural opiates that have gripped humanity from the early ages. They included our predilection for tribal formations, an affinity for conspiracies, mythical constructions that acted as prophylactics for real problems, and our ability to construct worlds that were more real than reality itself.




Eco’s Chamber / 2019
The poster generator came with four options to manipulate images within its frame. Warping along the x-axis, vertical manipulation along the y-axis, increasing the number of layers of the image, and a dilation tool to distort the fundamental composition of the image itself. Users could download each of their posters after completion.
References:
1 Eco, Umberto, and William Weaver. 1998. Faith in fakes: essays. London: Secker and Warburg.
2 Eco, Umberto. 2009. The infinity of lists. London: MacLehose.