DANCING ON THE LIP OF A VOLCANO

How do we design during times of uncertainty? It feels like we are on the brink, dancing on the lip of a volcano, or rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic before it sinks.

I am sitting in solitary splendour in autumn Melbourne when I expected I would be in Providence, Rhode Island in spring time. In my homeland, in the space of three months, years of drought have been layered with unprecedented bushfires, and a very contagious and potentially deadly virus is causing rapid social and economic change. Our resilience is being tested in every possible way.

We live on an island, in the past isolated by distance, but no longer. The country of immigrants — long a refuge — far away from war and poverty, is as exposed as the countries those immigrants left. Technology and prosperity that brought us many benefits has also brought us danger. The last of the generations that knew the great depression and the world wars and previous epidemics are very elderly and the most vulnerable to this new one. 

The oldest of our kind know that this feeling is not new to humanity. There have been many times in history where ordinary people and designers have dealt with the random discontinuity of natural disaster and disease, the imposed consequences of war or the dictates of political movements. Designers have also deliberately sought to create discontinuity in the form of social and environmental change.

I am interested in our strengths and weaknesses as humans. The human appetite for novelty. Our need for social relationships. The balance we seek between the need to conform enough to feel we belong and yet stand out enough in the hope of attracting and being special to someone. Our fascination with the sublime and grotesque. Our susceptibility to believe in promises and dreams while we fail to recognise the real world signs of changes that threaten our existence until it is too late. To believe astrologers but not scientists. Our need to deny our vulnerability. To act as though we can plan our lives many years ahead. Our compassion and kindness, our altruism and capacity for self sacrifice. Our selfishness, suspicion and cruelty. To welcome and to isolate.  Our belief that in the end science will save us - no matter what.

By defamiliarizing our world I seek to create a change in consciousness.

I often look to the history of clothes and their production for inspiration as the most basic, enduring expression of human experience. Through the centuries what we use to cover and protect our bodies so closely expresses and embodies the cultural, social, political, spiritual and economic conditions of our times. What we make and what we wear expresses who and what we are, our circumstances and the choices available to us. Craft and design are the crucible and engine house of human adaptation.  Art, as the expression of how we understand ourselves and our experience, creates the narrative that allows us to examine and refine the direction the engine takes.

Examples of both were seen in Balenciaga’s Autumn/Winter 20 Paris fashion show in early March 2020; when bushfires, global warming and climate change crisis were our focus and the pandemic that has now taken centre stage was waiting in the wings.

“The audience groped its way into the darkened Balenciaga stadium and suddenly realized that the first two rows were inundated with water—well, that gave ‘immersion’ a hellishly ominous new twist. It was just the beginning of Demna Gvasalia’s procession of sinister characters, walking on a vast stretch of water beneath an apocalyptic sky rent with fire, lightning and churning seas.” (Vogue.com, 2020)

In Demna Gvasalia’s apocalyptic world I saw the Australian bushfires, the floods that followed and the pandemic on the horizon. Everyone was represented from refugees to bike messengers and people in ball gowns.

Speculative outfits, diegetic prototypes for dark, dire, apocalyptic, dystopian futures and strangely less commonly those associated with clean, artificially lit, streamlined and minimalist utopian futures, have been coming down the couture runways for decades. Recently these visions have started appearing in the broader world of design and art.

I feel strongly drawn, through my design practice, to respond constructively and reimagine the world with a positive, generative and constructive vision while identifying, analysing and referencing past experiences of adaptation, creativity and resilience. I want to challenge the aesthetics of the future. What does design in uncertainty look like? I love the lofi, trash, messy and colorful world we already inhabit. I see the need for examination and reflection to identify the useful values and lessons of the past to be carried with us. We need to remember where we have come from to be confident in our chosen future.  I don’t see the future as a shiny self deceptive, escapist new toy that we have to completely negate, obliterate our past or present to build. I want to augment, amplify and defamiliarize that idealised future world as a way to encourage us to notice and preserve what we value from our current experience and move forward with compassion, respect and continuity.

PART 2 (Work in Progress)

Why after Covid, we will never find a place where there is nowhere left to go.
Where we are right now is always a place to be and now it’s always infinite.

This pandemic has accelerated a transition that was already coming to fruition. Though our worlds seem to be becoming more segmented than ever in our physical reality, we are able to and some say need to, exist in many places and in many versions of our physical forms all at once in digital space.

There is one limitation of our digital interactions as they exist now. The energy only flows one way. The inputs from our physical reality into digital space does not extend further to produce an action again in our physical world. In this way, they defy the continuous feedback systems that are characteristic of our experience of the natural and physical world. This lack of connection means that these digital network connections fall short of humanity and nuance.

Instead, I propose an input, action and output solution–a continuous feedback loop. A merging of the physical and digital space that integrates both and is as textured as our life pre pandemic.

Materiality, reading, translation and inclusion are all key in this intertwining of our lives of “real world” physical experience and the ways we “exist” online.

I want to acknowledge that access to digital technology and platforms has always been exclusive and a privilege and for many and it continues to be. Though Covid has accentuated and enhanced the privilege of those who can occupy and own private space (for quarantining in the Covid era and conduct their business and professional lives from that space).

Our world is rapidly becoming more segregated than ever.

In this context, I think that graphic designers face a moral dilemma. Are we to be captured in the process of escalating the bubble of privilege or is it possible to  be part of a new design landscape helping to create a new and accessible integrated physical/digital way of living?

I have always appreciated the authenticity of graphic design as a field because it has evolved alongside societies it has illustrated, recorded and reflected.  Although, this is generally motivated by capital gain which we need to recognise. We have benefitted from being part of a trade driven by profit.

I wonder if what we know now as professional graphic design and the potential social contribution of the critical eye it casts will move towards more specialised art practice and a new graphic design will emerge in the service of the integration of both real world physical experience with digital presence? How will it distinguish itself from the more commercially driven levels of graphic design or from AI assisted citizen practice.  How will education need to change to support this transition and preserve the traditions of pedagogy and professional graphic design practice in a world where old models may no longer be viable?

This new graphic design is already developing to integrate these physical and digital spaces and is able to think beyond the physical/physics and the laws of the natural world through simulated realities. This is already familiar to Gen Z and holds huge potential to explore the social inequities and institutional discrimination accentuated by Covid 19 and map and model potential ways forward to address them.

We have the chance to choose our roles in the future use of graphic forms in social change and commerce. However not making an active choice is still a choice. (I often think I might start my career as a graphic designer, but I might come to the end of my career as more of an artist  if I don’t consider the changes that are presented)