The everyday is a difficult term to define, it portrays our daily activities, spaces, and surroundings alongside its experience. What counts as ‘everyday’ for one person may be a special occasion for someone else, hence the confusion? The student life at the university helps to establish a common ground in this regard. In fact, students all around the world are having almost the same ‘everyday’. ‘Everyday’ is a powerful tool of influence in a consumer society. It has been a fairly stable concept unless disturbed by historic shocks such as war, natural disasters, or in this case a pandemic.
Everyday aesthetics makes us miss somethings, want somethings and change somethings in life. It’s like the decision to go into a café with sanitisation stands and the staff wearing masks while ignoring others that serve better but don’t appeal to the everyday aesthetics of the pandemic era. Our university went through a similar process of aestheticizing when the pandemic infrastructure both real and virtual became part of our new ‘everyday’ university life.
Covid-19 vaccine bus on campus
The process is ongoing and we are in the second phase of it. The initial phase was the worst when the pandemic shut down educational systems and restricted access to university. The second phase already saw the introduction of a mixed learning approach. It opened up university spaces by implementing social distancing, face masks, thermal scanners, and sanitisation stands around the campus. The fresher’s week, campus tours, and graduation ceremonies that didn’t happen in the previous years were all happening because of the ‘pandemic infrastructure’ in place. We saw university webpages, brochures, and social media showing students wearing masks, people sanitising their hands and even the vaccination bus become part of the ‘everyday’ projection of university life.
The third phase is all about the new ‘everyday’ and simply defines what stays and what leaves from the ‘everyday’ of the pandemic era. The future of the university experience is going to rely heavily on technology but there are subtle things too that might continue in the new ‘everyday’ like the arm tags at the APL Workshop which restricts the number of people inside which simultaneously has been so effective in controlling the workflow that I think they would continue using that plexiglass armband case at the entrance, though I am not so sure about the sterilising wipes. The visual markers of the post-pandemic ‘everyday aesthetic’ will still be everywhere, but let’s hope that what stays will be the best from both times.