I learned about the concept of the dérive from the book Creative Acts for Curious People. The book is from the Stanford d.school, and it has a series of practices that can help you be more creative.

The French word “dériver” means “to divert,” “to drift,” “to wander,” or “to derive”. It can also be used figuratively to describe something drifting away from a set path or intention. In the context of dérive, it refers to an unplanned urban walk or journey. Instead of going outside with a goal in mind, you go outside without a plan and see where your eye takes you. You notice things that you have never noticed before. The round shape of the gas meter covers, or the number of things that are yellow. I have been enjoying doing this and in years past I documented my wanderings on Instagram with photo collages.

I recently learned that this practice comes from the Situationists, a radical art and political movement active in the mid-20th century. They critiqued how modern cities are designed to promote productivity, consumption, and surveillance and thereby produce alienation. The dérive was a playful, poetic resistance to this. By intentionally wandering without a fixed goal, often against the prescribed flows of streets and signage, the dérive sought to uncover hidden emotional and psychological contours of the city, reclaiming space for personal and collective meaning.

At a recent trip to IKEA, I was struck by the how precisely the store is designed exactly in the way the Situationists describe, like a micro city designed to promote productivity and consumption. So as we snaked our way through the set path, I allowed my eye to catch something, anything to subvert it. Eventually I started noticing the theme of meshes and grids. Here is my photo-collage of my dérive…