What Will You Create? With Artist, Designer, and Tinkerer Kelli Anderson

Image via Design Milk.

What can you do with a piece of paper?

For Kelli Anderson, the answer is simple: anything. The Brooklyn-based artist and designer also calls herself as a tinkerer—she simply loves to discover how things work, and more importantly, to find out how to make them better.

This book is a…

Anderson’s latest project is a book called This Book Is a Planetarium: And Other Extraordinary Pop-Up Contraptions, and it’ll change the way you think about paper. The contents of the book can transform into six fully-functional tools: a working planetarium projecting the constellations, a geometric drawing generator, an infinite calendar, a message decoder, a musical instrument including strings for strumming, and a speaker that amplifies sound.

This means, theoretically, you could jam your favorite song on repeat, in code, for the whole neighborhood to hear, while gazing under the stars and sketching out some drawings. That’s pretty cool.

“I also wanted to add a camera, but the publishers figured people wouldn’t want to go into a dark room to develop the pictures,” says Anderson, speaking at Circles Conference in Grapevine, Texas. “That was one of the tools that got scrapped. But you really could take photos with it.”

Image via Kelli Anderson.

What can you do with paper?

Anderson’s fascination with paper dates back to when her friends asked her to make an invitation to their wedding. Rather than go the traditional cardstock or magnet route, Anderson paired their love of music with her love of drawing and creating. She used a paper record player to house a flexi disc—you know, those really cheap floppy ones that used to come in cereal boxes or magazines. When a pin was placed on the record and it was rotated at 45 RPMs, the record began playing a song recorded by the bride and groom themselves, inviting guests to their wedding. The disc featured a few different illustrations of the happy couple’s future, depicting life events like the honeymoon and growing old together.

“We had to make individual copies for each guest,” recalls Anderson. “Some people told us they liked it, though I’m sure half of them never even got played—do you really picture your 85-year-old great aunt spinning a record like that?”

Don’t think releasing a book and an album is going to slow her down, either; currently in a creative residency with Adobe, Anderson has had plenty of time to let her curiosity get the best of her. And, true to form, her creations have come from the most simple of sources, like scouring the depths of Google Images (where 1.8 billion photos are uploaded every day). Whether it’s balls flying across the sky and bouncing on the ground, or a plane doing barrel rolls effortlessly through the air, Anderson is a terrific example of what you can create if you let your mind wander.

This spotlight was originally featured on People & Things Magazine.