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.