The picnic blanket at the time of social distancing

After the do-it-yourself masks created during confinement, the design community is now looking to "phase 2" and to the challenges posed by the need to regain some form of social gatherings while keeping an eye on health safety rules. Accustomed to reinterpreting with surprising inventiveness some objects of our everyday life (like for Life 01 or Change The Record), the English designer Paul Cocksedge creates an anomalous circular picnic blanket designed to allow four people to meet and interact staying two meters away.

"As a designer that works with sizes and measurements on a daily basis, I sometimes find it hard to accurately interpret two meters", says Cocksedge, explaining the insight that led him to the creation of Here Comes the Sun. Conceived as an open source project within the reach of anyone, the blanket can be made by following the instructions in a manual available for downloading, even if its implementation remains adaptable to available materials. The unknown, all to be verified, remains the ability to really incorporate these objects in our new daily life: will interaction be made less authentic by such a dilated proxemics?