During the intensive lecture, I wrote down a quote from a book: “You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one.” How inspiring, I thought. Professor Pedriali continued by saying she’s very worried, as this is an act of violence — to take away someone’s story and to insert a dominant narrative. It’s not inspiring at all. Oops, I felt embarrassed.
Is graphic design violent? Is aesthetics violent?
Kaleena Sales talked about how people’s interpretation of words is based on their socioeconomic experience. For example, after being asked to design a “nice logo for a bank,” a wealthy student might make something neutral and quiet, while others might imagine banks as gold or flashy (Imperfect Index, 2024). However, one of them is more “correct”. Isn’t that preference violent?
Since I started at the university, I heard many innovative ideas, either from entrepreneurs or workshop participants. Sometimes I thought, please don’t let us shape the future — these cool ideas scare me. A less scary example is my Interdisciplinary Futures group project — we ended up designing a service to deliver accessible arts education for kids in rural UK. It was interdisciplinary, as the decision-makers were from different backgrounds. But none of us grew up in rural UK or has anything else to do with the situation. Isn’t that decision-making power violent?
Like in order to fill in the gaps, technical engineers end up making moral decisions when designing high-stakes algorithms, graphic designers also make decisions that impact end users. I often hear designers say “people are not stupid” when they design something edgy/hard to use.
I remember standing in front of two toilet doors inside a hipster burger place when I first moved to Cornwall: one has the word “rooster” written on the door, and the other one has “hen.” Is this an English test? I’m guessing the designer told themself people are not stupid. Small fonts are premium, old people are not our target audience anyway. Idioms are fine, non-native speakers may not be our target audience either? Flashing light is cool, and so is using Japanese characters as decorations and making homelesscore fashionable.
That is violence.
Where are the alternatives though? In my previous blogs I talked about seeing mundane things under poetic lights, giving new meanings to ordinary objects, speculative packaging design, hope, uselessness, rubbish. I think there is a thread there, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do.
Maybe The Mushroom at the End of the World will tell me something? Maybe I’ll keep reading my newly discovered design books until I find something? Maybe the answer is in zine-making? This project will be about design, aesthetics, and alternatives.
———————————————————
Other thoughts about my project:
After reading Research for People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create, I had more thought about the relationship between research and artwork. Maybe instead of creating something and backing it up in words, I could do my research first and use artwork as a way to document my research findings.
Also I want to interview people! If this is a project about rejecting the dominant narrative, it makes sense to interview all kinds of people, right?
———————————————————
Thanks for reading xx
