The first tutorial with Theo for me was all about some of my initial thoughts around the issue I wanted to combat. Before deciding on my final idea I first wanted to gain an understanding for the problem I’m looking to address in order to gain a greater understanding of it before creating anything.
Idea 1
The first issue I looked into was Covid. The pandemic has caused different problems for different people all around the world and there are many issues which stem from this. The issue I spoke about with Theo was this idea that many designers within critical design tend to exaggerate everything in order to make their point, for example making popsicles out of polluted water, something people would clearly never eat but it makes use of that to illustrate the fact that water pollution is a real problem. However, many of the problems we have faced throughout the pandemic are so unbelievable in themselves that I wouldn’t need to dramatise anything or display it in an exaggerated way because of the fact the pandemic has been so dramatised and handled so badly in many cases anyway. Facts around deaths or how long it took for the government to lock us down are so unbelievable in themselves that simply giving those facts to viewers is shocking enough without having to dramatise it.
The idea could focus on any aspect of the pandemic, but the most prominent for me is the handling of the pandemic and the way that the government and other governments around the world have acted in the pandemic.
Theo’s feedback was based around the idea of branding something awful or controversial like Jeffrey Epstein’s island in a bid to illustrate the real truth and show how in many cases it has been played down. This is an interesting idea, branding something bad in an attempt to make it look good and illustrate the facts in an almost ironic way. The idea of it being played down is interesting as well, the pandemic in many cases and specifically in the early stages was played down in order to limit panic, so that’s definitely something which could be used within the design.
Ben Jackson 