Draw Your Phone: The Cellphone as an Intimate, Everyday Artefact
Alum Colleen Morgan published "Draw Your Phone: The Cellphone as an Intimate, Everyday Artefact" as a chapter in the Bloomsbury book Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era.
This chapter examines how drawing cellphones using traditional illustration techniques encourages a deeper engagement with archaeological methods and the materiality of contemporary artefacts. An experiment was devised to observe students as they drew their own cellphones and discuss their drawings in a focus group afterwards. The students found that drawing led them to make unique, detailed observations about the appearance of and their interactions with their phones. The effectiveness of this exercise has been demonstrated with postgraduate and undergraduate university students, but also archaeological professionals with several years of experience. The goal of drawing cellphones is to provoke critical thinking about our encounters with everyday objects including their impact on our personal lives and the environment.
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