I arrived in Munich on this day, two years ago. A new mindset unfolded in front me as I left behind academia and moved to a way of thinking that allowed for a bit more of time for truly personal projects. My list of ideas grew in the blink of an eye. One of them captivated my mind in particular. The inkFrame. A picture frame that would show a different, new and unknown picture each time you look at it. It would not just be a boring frame showing a pre-selection of my holiday pictures, but it would show images that I had not chosen and thus never seen before. And it would use electronic ink, such that it could be on but off at the same time, all the time.

For the first version of the inkFrame, I made a custom wooden laser-cut frame (detail)

It took a while. But two years later, the second prototype stands on a small table in my apartment. It can show anything. Pictures. Text. Time. Weather. And in this time of lockdown, I have chosen to show motivational quotes on it. The frame gets them from a few Twitter accounts, and updates the image every five minutes. Each time I look at it, I get a new short wisdom to think about. But unlike Twitter, there is no scrolling. There is no dumb time wasting as you cannot ask for a new message. You are left there, on your own, thinking about it. It often lights up my day in this indefinite quarantine that nobody would have foreseen two years ago.

The second version of the inkFrame fits into a standard IKEA RIBBA frame