It’s the end of semester one for my second year. I’ve submitted my 1000 word proposal a while ago and had some time thinking about it in the background.
I took Narratives of Digital Capitalism taught by Ben Collier. It invited me to dig for inherent logics of businesses, how technology is never inevitable, how entrenchment of technology ensures its existence, how infrastructure is invisible until it breaks, and how language, experiences, relationships are all treated as data capital. These are all relevant when thinking about design. At argued in What is Post-branding?, branding is not a natural human behaviour since the beginning of time like some expert claimed. Branding’s omnipresence makes it hard to image a world where organisations produce consistent messages without “branding” themselves. Visual storytelling is like infrastructure, usually invisible, but could be made visible by breaking it. Finally, how identities and subcultures are treated as raw materials for “coolness”. How designers mine for trendy looks are comparable to how social media companies mine for user behavioural data.
Workshop theme
1. Should I present what design is doing to society in unexpected ways? In The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: What Artists Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Data Practice, Stark and Crawford presented defamiliarzation as a way to draw the audience in. For example, artist James Bridle used chalk to trap self-driving car. My recent work Seven Pigeons (short process video here) exposes the strangeness of LLM by asking it questions that doesn’t make sense to a human. The result is somewhat poetic, but it also highlights how LLM do not think like a human. I really enjoyed working on this project, and I wonder if I should take it further to my workshops, invite my participants to take one aspect of graphic design and make it alien? I also made a zine where I composed poems entirely out of slogans. I think something unexpected and exposing like these two examples can be fun.
2. I also took the Writing Speculative Fiction course, and I find the intensives very engaging. Maybe I make this workshop about speculative fictions on design? The World After Amazon is an amazing project that invites Amazon workers to writing workshops to imagine a world in the future, and where Amazon fits in that future. The editors then collected worker-written short fictions into a book.
3. I participated in a Zine Scavenging workshop at Glasgow Zine Library. Participants took unusual material like packaging waste to make zines. This workshop made me think it’s a good idea to let participants do something with their hands. It’s enjoyable to create something, not just talking about it.
Participants
In the Data Civics course I audited this year, guest lecturer Dr Cailean Gallagher talked about how he invited Deliveroo workers to co-create a survey, and used this survey to collect data from Deloveroo drivers. This co-creation process motivated the workers so much that they started organising their own events and are currently driving policy changes in Edinburgh. This case study is inspiring, and made me think inviting graphic designers instead of general pubic would be better, as they can then carry on thinking about design in the future.
Publication
It is important to make sure my publication is collaborative and is not just about how I think. If I want to do design more justly, I have to abandon the habit of individualism, and embrace a feminist and decolonial approach by at least include multiple authors for the publication. More details on copyright and compensation to be decided later.
