Blood type is a collaborative project born out of a dissatisfaction with the predictable, uniform and often boring aesthetic that is more often than not prescribed by digital printing. By taking blood from the veins of collaborators and administering it into an ink jet print cartridge, we have endeavoured to redeem the digital print, restoring the bespoke qualities of individual craft effort displaced by the perfect nature of the digital. The project aims to reverse the effects of redistributed knowledge, empowering the crafts person to once again engage in a process of risk rather than one of certainty, maintaining authority over the tools that necessitate contemporary design practice. Technology is not the predictable element in the relationship between design and design production, it is the lack of imagination and the dispassionate way in which we employ digital technology that constrains our latitude of play as designers.
