Things

Whilst words are feeble support to this documentation of little things in the Rasta office I offer them as added context. The photo journal is quite useful without them too, and I’d imagine it will be interpreted differently by everyone who spends time dwelling on it.

Things such as these bring a certain sense of familiarity and connection among people who’ve occupied the physical idea of the Rasta office space. They’re like that grocery store that you cross everyday, that ashtray that you stretch your hand towards without looking up. One of these could have even been an ashtray. It’s supposed to be reassuring that you’re in proximity of your comfort zone. At the same time, they present an opportunity to bring respite from the taedium vitae caused by this very sense of familiarity as people would be experiencing about their homes right now. A lot of these inanimates are in fact tools to push us out of our comfort zone. As I write this, the physical idea for a creative enterprise is being tested. I have no doubt that people will return to workspaces as certain outcomes are best achieved in the physical presence of one-another. For instance, we pride ourselves on a decently curated library. It has a few international publications with timeless work on advertising and culture. The hardcopies of Creative Review for example are an education for anyone who’ll have them. Inside cupboards in every room there are all kinds of forgotten building blocks, waiting to be dusted & summoned. One such is the Nikon camera, ironically shot here. It predates our production division itself, and was used to click basic amateur stuff. The closets are cluttered with other crafty junk like putty, old broken keyboards, dead hard-drives and of course product samples and customer giveaways that never went.

You’ll also always find cricket balls in the Rasta office, they’re playful but people are always a little conscious around them as opposed to say a soft tennis ball. The one we’ve featured is a 2-piece (as opposed to the 4 piece used in international cricket games). It’s been tossed around like bad briefs and has done more damage than it probably would have in its natural habitat, again, a bit like a bad brief.

There are other things that I’ve picked up when on travel like coasters and bobble heads, love coasters, hate when they disappear. Then there is the miniature NYC taxi, a dainty reminder about the ambition of building a global shop.

There’s also shit like the neck massager, a cheap Mimoso product that can double up as a noose if you feel like pretending that the work is killing you.

Brand building has plenty of symbolism and our everyday life with coffee cups and dysfunctional Bose speakers go rather well with high functioning Sens. For right now though, it’s just our cellphones and laptops as these things wait oblivious of why they’ve been so suddenly abandoned.

I can’t really say what the future of our workspace or any workspace is going to be. But these are tiny ornamental props in our journey. Each with their own little story of how they made it in(to) Rasta.