Designer's Dystopia

First of all, I would like to ask you to define what fantasy is? what is it like to be in a dream? Close your eyes, and try to visualize it in your mind.

Does the image come to you similar to the image above? What if I ask you before you see this image, would it make any difference? As a design student, I have asked this question many times. How far does the source of information affect my design output?

There's a diverse way to see the world we live in today. One might have a positive outlook that human culture and development will make our world a better place to live in. With the ongoing trend, climate crisis, human crisis, and ongoing issues, we couldn't help but imagine that an apocalyptic world is not far ahead. However, if we look closer again aren't we already living in a dystopian world now? A world where creativity seems to flourish, but is currently dying.

Thanks to social media and the internet, everyone is becoming an influencer, creator, and artist of their own. But with the risk of influencing and being an influencer, the world has become more uniform than ever. We are borrowing and stealing ideas, we think we create something new when we are actually just crafting. We take for granted inspirations from the internet, anything that does not make sense or is economically invaluable is trash. We give meanings based on the information we see online, and we begin to trust ourselves to give meanings and imagination less and less. Especially with the development of AI these days, we begin to lose our confidence. Do humans create AI or does AI shape our way of being creative? 

If creativity indeed has collapsed, what are we supposed to do? Is there a need for us to fix it? As designers, I think we should reconsider how we do things. Unhabituate ourselves from seeking inspiration from other works, keep an open mind, and reconsider the neoliberal ideology we unconsciously internalized in our lives. We don't design only for sales, we don't project our life as a subject of popularity. I think designers also need to redefine themselves as something more than an employee with a mouse and design softwares. Designers have their own power and freedom to create more than a set of design guides and rules.

Shock tactic is absurd!

Shock tactics have always worked well to attract instant public attention, stir up discussions and criticism among the public. Things like the porcelain urinal as an art, or duct-taped banana in the museum have never failed to be brought up once in a while when talking about absurdity in art. But does this strategy still work today? it takes more than just yes or no to answer this question. I think we need to put the intention, purpose, and risks into account when talking about shock tactics.

With the rapidly growing technology and communication, the culture also constantly growing and changing. People start to develop critical thinking towards any information they find. However, society also begins to create its own standard of ethics according to their convenience.  So there's nothing certain, it's always an experiment when we're talking about public response. The things that are beyond the social 'ethics' will become viral, a place for discussion, and this is exactly the purpose of shock tactics. Of course, in terms of becoming 'viral,' they could be categorized as either extreme 'positive' or extreme 'negative'. Either people will love it or they will hate it. This is where things get interesting, the debate.

Personally, I think that something that we get quickly we also lose it quickly. When there's nothing to talk about, the public gets bored, and the next thing you know it will be quickly covered by a new topic. Also, it is very risky to test the public's standard of ethics, once the public labels it as 'bad', it will be quite a challenge to change this image. I think being different is great, especially in this very saturated world, but creating a meaningful difference is what we need to achieve more than anything. I'm not saying that being weird is wrong, but it's always important to consider our position in society and to be responsible for whatever we are doing.