About

Reineke Otten (The Netherlands, 1979) is a designer working in the field of visual sociology. She records and assembles images and information to reveal society’s patterns and orders — and occasionally, to generate beauty.

In parallel to the WSC project, Reineke practices ‘streetology’, an intuitive method of classifying and visually analyzing patterns of urban daily life. To understand the delicate relationships among places, she collects images of mundane but unique details that are so often overlooked, lost, or forgotten in the development of cities. This research process feeds her ever-evolving online catalog, urbandailylife.com, and has led to commissioned work by the Gwangju Design Biennale (‘Design is design is not design’, 2011) and OMA (‘Dubai Next, Face of 21st Century’, 2008). It also inspired her collaboration with the Dynamic City Foundation (2004), which resulted in the publication of two books: China Daily Life (2006) and The Chinese Dream (2008).