boxes!

A love letter to cardboard boxes

Today our lives are inextricably tied to our devices, and with that comes the compulsory idea of digital immortality. We have lost the essence of the passing of time in our digital worlds. No longer do our memories fade and old conversations lost. Our entire digital lives are immortalized.

This phenomenon is deeply inhuman. We are the first era of all mankind to experience this life detached from time. It is a stark reality we often overlook amidst the sheer velocity of our world.

As we lead into this immortal future, in direct sacrifice for convenience, we forgo our rich moments of serendipitous rediscovery of our previous lives. Beautiful nostalgic moments which rekindle moments and eras of your younger self have been reduced to photo album scrolling, post archives, and dopamine inducing digital experiences like Snapchat memories. While these reductions serve great convenience, they are a substantial disservice to the true emotional richness of our past and memories, losing most if not all of its resonance.

It is a universal experience that anyone in some shape or form has gone through. It happens whenever you move homes, do spring cleaning, or just looking for something buried in your closet - when suddenly, you are transported right back to a forgotten time period in your life. An era where those seedlings of core memories blossomed and helped chisel who you are today. All those feelings and memories rekindled and uncovered alongside the years of dust which coats your old treasure chest of memories - the old cardboard box. These ordinary boxes are overlooked. These boxes are a genuine capsule of ourselves, serving to capture an era in our lives in a time period long past.

Time is the core essence of reflection. Without the sense of time, how can nostalgia ever be truly felt? It is through reflection we truly understand who we are, as Socrates quoted: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. It is this fundamental human need to reflect – whether reminiscing or moving forward – that is inextricably tied to our sense of time. Yet, these extraordinary moments of reflection are often sparked by encounters with the ordinary cardboard box. These romantic moments in life are fading away in the shadow of frictionless digital tools.

Observing this stark gap resonated deeply with us, precisely prompting the question: How might we spark rediscovery and the essence of nostalgia within our digital lives? Through extensive ideation, we arrived at an approach that goes beyond tangibility, but captures the longing feeling of rediscovering your past – that deeply and characteristically human experience of the passage of time.

This reflection, this love letter, is the beating heart of our project. We are distilling the profound 'cardboard box moment'—an experience we all uniquely resonate with, rich with potential for self-discovery and healing for the soul—into a meaningful, perhaps 'slow,' digital experience.