Crafting dialogical designs for any discussion.
This book is an exploration of the tension between private and public spaces as it critiques the design of our personal spaces: the architecture of the house. This is done by visually and typographically retelling an essay by the philosopher Vilem Flusser.
In his essay, Flusser argues that the design of the house, constructed as one’s-own-private-castle, is an obsolete and destructive means of living space. It is built to isolate the individual (empowering them with the concept of privacy) but gives a false sense of independent sustainability because every house needs holes to connect to the outside world. These holes are literal (such as a windows, doors, vents, electrical sockets and drains) but are also more metaphoric (such as televisions, computers and radios). Although these holes invade the private space, they are vital to the castle’s existence: the individual, in other words, cannot live completely cut off from the public.
With so many holes demolishing the private castle, living in the mist of the rubble of the past, we are presented with perpetually re-living this dead architecture or to take a risk in building a new way of living.
This project is an exploration of the role design has in the social debate of liberty. Whereas graphic design has typically been branding positions or aggressive attacks on oppositions in freedom issues, the contention of this project is to actively engage users in the debate on liberty. Borrowing the Hegelian notion of freedom, arguments for liberty are ultimately centered on an ideal that manifests itself into a nexus of executable actions. Liberty, thus, is the horizon that circumscribes one’s construct of the good life.
The basis of this project became to translate the dialogical aspect of liberty into a design artifact. This was accomplished by creating an interactive info-graphic, where a series of interlocking gears rotate to reveal the different logical arguments of each position. Although the positions featured in this project are not exhaustive (there are only four), they were the main prominent positions discovered in earlier research and hence could be best explained. The vellum covering of the gears presents the tunnel vision of freedom fights; although other people’s opinions and understandings exist, it can become easily out of focus and practically invisible to the salient position chosen.
Two social issues were chosen to dissect and illustrate some of the arguments: gay marriage and euthanasia. The two boxes map the complexity of the argument’s frame on a social issue. By visualizing the contrasting positions and illustrating the magnitude of disparity, the presentation of social issues aspires the civil conversation of liberty, rooted in respect and understanding of oppositional positions.
From phones to computers, and every hybrid in between, the average electronic communicator is constantly adapting and modifying the English language to fit new technology. But just how is the digital medium changing the medium of language? This question unleashes the ubiquitous subject of language in the modern age, an area explored by the new magazine, Parole.
Parole is a quarterly magazine providing stimulating commentaries on the state of language. It bridges the gap between the dusty academic theories of linguistics and the rapid evolution of modern language. While a growing generation of bloggers, texters, and instant messengers have been adapting the English language to the digital medium, the linguistic field have been absent in covering this change. The scope ranges from following new forms of argot (such as wrtng 4 txt mssgs) to analyzing the carefully crafted words of politicians (which can be quite powerful, as Orwell cautions us in his novel 1984). Parole magazine serves as the unique intersection between linguistic theories and modern communication.
This project began with an interest of the public education system. My preliminary research had an underlying assertion that the K-12 system is not preparing children for the workforce; in other words, there is a dichotomy between how we teach kids in school and how we expect them to perform in the workforce. The challenge became how to visually portray this shortfall of the education system, in a way that somehow proves it.
I decided to approach this dilemma indirectly; by looking at the general trend of the concept of knowledge, the poster visually reveals that it historically takes about 300 years for our understanding of knowledge to adapt to a communication change. Since the electronic medium is relatively new, not even society has adapted a suitable understanding of knowledge, and hence the education system (being a social construct) is not able to sufficiently prepare kids for the change that is occurring.
A simple historical trend becomes glaringly obvious when visualized on a timeline. It speaks to the viewer by placing all this fast-pace change since the Internet in context with the history of the world.
