Quarantine, lockdown, social and physical distancing, pandemic: words we usually only encounter in dystopian literature and movies have become the defining motto of our lives. As we adjust to life under new rules, we, as the Royal College and Victoria & Albert Museum’s History of Design programme, like everyone else, have had to radically alter our approach to studying and working.

As first-year students, our contributions to RCA2020 form a work-in-progress encounter with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This serves as a springboard for collecting, discussing and sharing ideas on the topic of Digital Discomforts. The project explores issues brought about by the accessibility of libraries during lockdown and the strengths and failures of their digital resources, the impact of colonial and hegemonic thinking on digital access to knowledge, the impact of the lack of physicality and the sometimes unwanted intimacy of remote learning, and the digital inequalities arising from disability.

Resulting from intense weeks of collaborative work, the following diagrams and videos are representations of our practice as design historians, intended to reflect real-life corridor-conversations we would have usually had in person as part of our studies. Impromptu, spontaneous and intellectually unpredictable these conversations embrace spelling mistakes and thematic jumps as characteristic of the method of communication. Our diagrams show the twists and turns of such informal, creative encounters. The maps were designed to induce in the reader a sense of the discomfort arising from digital inequality, and as a consequence, it is sometimes deliberately difficult to penetrate beyond their apparently orderly and attractive surface.