DESIGNING A NON-DESIGNED EXPERIENCE


How could the experience be redesigned from a different perspective in a way that heightens the experience? This question forces me to consider what I think the value of design is - and what I feel design could/should be used for. My own approach to design is very much about using the designer's palette of tools; organizational skills, lateral thinking, visual processing, visual flair to reveal, to convince, to sway an audience.

I really like the idea of applying design and design principles to unexpected areas. I think its power and potential can be heightened through unexpected application.

1) using organizational power of design; applying it to a very human, somewhat uncontrollable human interaction - a date. Eg. Creating forms/how to manual for a date. Evaluating compatibility, best location for persons involved, climate conditions. Trying to apply listing/logic/instructions to real life. I am unsure to proceed as I suspect this is essentially a non-functional enterprise and I don't believe it could really improve this date.

2) Use the transformative/illusory powers of design to turn a social interaction into a dramatization of itself. This appeals to me more, in that the purpose is not to use design to really improve the function of a thing, but actually to make that thing more interesting.

I don't really believe in graphic design as a thing to reveal some hidden truth, or necessarily a way of making things clearer. It creates a new truth that we read as the 'clearer' view - such as information design of voting ballots or hospital signage. Beyond basic legibility - the truth or clarity of this sort of design is no different for me than a piece of Soviet propaganda or a really compelling ad for x-box. Design can entertain in order to convince; I see it always as a deceptive shroud of some kind. I enjoy design that creates an alternate world - a world that looks like the real world but is actually completely fictitious. A good production designer can create a space that we read as real but is completely engineered to work for the camera, to work with the characters who interact with it, and essentially makes the action more interesting. Effective event planning is no different.

I am interested in turning mundane, non-dramatic events into dramatizations. I do this in a very controlled way and on a controlled scale with my graphic design projects - dramatizing content to make that content more pertinent, more memorable, more entertaining, or more convincing.

I am intrigued by the idea of transforming a social interaction (which has an inherent dramatic quality to it) into a true dramatization. My thesis is focusing on the generation of suspense through narrative structures, and the effect of suspense on narrative structures. I am looking at the temporal implications of suspense on action; how things can be slowed down or sped up in relation to each other to render action more suspenseful. This is really centred around the notion that suspense as stalling action, somehow withholding facts, concealing how facts are communicated to an audience.