Using the Surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ method, and with a photograph of a household object from the Stanley Picker House (Kingston University) by John Short as inspiration, Rogers asked 24 contributors, among them chef Heston Blumenthal, fashion designer Shelley Fox, and Design Museum Director Deyan Sudjic, each to write the story of a single hour in the life of the fictional Ernesto Bones. To construct the story, the last two sentences of each contributor’s text were sent on to form the starting point for the next person in the chain. Rogers interpreted these stories to create a surrealist installation of designed objects.
The creation of narratives is central to Rogers’s research and professional practice, and often forms the starting point for his firm’s work. The process starts with an idea, which is expressed through drawings, and then developed by a search for appropriate references, culminating in a narrative of images and text, often in the form of a private book for the office and the client. This narrative influences both the design and the client, often encouraging the latter to go further than anticipated in their design ideas. In this project, Rogers wanted, not merely to develop a narrative about the design for the project, but also to make the narrative the design itself by removing the client. The poetic aspect of narrative could then be fully explored through the ‘exquisite corpse’ method and a large collection of creative multidisciplinary collaborators.
This collaborative project was made possible through the Stanley Picker Fellowship, awarded to Rogers by Kingston University in 2009. The original exhibition at Kingston University travelled to Beijing for the Beijing Design Week. It was published as A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones (2011) and featured in Beijing Design Week (2011).