Five ways to wander through someone's opinions
Concepts for Alex's lists, from the curator. None of them has a menu of lists. In each, a visitor finds a list by moving through a place, and leaves it sideways into another. All are black ink on white paper.
Concept one
A Chart of the Opinionated Sea
Every list is an island drawn to the size of its length, set in seas named for its mood. You sail to whatever lies nearest, land, and find each item a numbered place with a gazetteer beside it.
Concept two
A Key to the Lists
A botanist's identification key: choose between pairs of plain statements about your mood until you are narrowed to a single list. It arrives as a specimen plate, with "similar species" leading on to the next.
Concept three
The Opinion Line
The lists are a railway. Each is a line and each item a station; you ride from the terminus outward and change trains wherever two lists touch. The hundred-item line runs an express and a stopping service.
Concept four
The Sky Tonight
A planisphere of opinions, where lists are constellations and only part of the sky is above the horizon at once. The disc starts where the calendar puts it, so each visit shows different lists until you turn it.
Concept five
Index
The front page is the back of a book: an index of the things, places and grudges inside the lists, never the lists themselves. Each page number drops you into the middle of one, and the margins lead you out again.
Each mock holds the same ten placeholder lists, among them a list of three, a list of seven and a list of a hundred, and carries a short designer's note at the foot of the page.