Between setting forth in the morning and returning home at night, every person lives nomadically for a portion of each day. You can't take everything with you—neither in your backpack nor in your head. Identifying essentials, and figuring out how to contain, arrange and keep track of them as you go, are instances of design thinking. In a video anthropology project investigating people's design of the miniature environments we carry with us, from 1988 to 2000 Strickland collected more than 100 “Portable Portraits”.
PORTABLE EFFECTS has been supported by Apple Computer, the National Endowment for the Arts, Interval Research Corporation, and the San Francisco Exploratorium.