Creatively Advancing into Novelty
This is Part 3 of my recent grad school design paper in which I attempt to imagine a not-so-distant future world for the post-capitalist designer. We begin by de-commodifying the basic necessities of life (Part 3a) before proceeding to identify some post-capitalist design needs (Part 3b) which will then allow us to consider the roles…
This is the first section in Part 2 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore two contemporary, post-capitalist movements that have much to offer our creative endeavor to imagine a new, ecologically sensitive design story. Degrowth and solarpunk are neither finished experiments nor cautionary tales but living, still-unfolding proposals, argued over…
This is the third section in Part 1 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore four laboratories of non-capitalist and postsocialist design. Please find the preceding sections below if you’d like to catch up: Introduction Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy…
I’ve decided to post my recent grad school paper in chunks since it is much longer than an average blog post. Below is the introduction. … Introduction Design is many things, but if we reflect on design as a trade or practice or vocation for a short time one might envision the people working as…
This is the introduction to a paper on William Morris I am writing for a MFA class, the rough draft of which I recently submitted. Introduction As generative AI floods our screens with astonishingly strange deepfakes and algorithms continue to commodify creativity, a quiet rebellion has been blooming: Gen Z “Luddites” ditch smartphones for flip…
“When we disentangle our identities from the civilization’s dominant story, we can begin imagining, embodying, and telling a new story, a story that gives us a deeper sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose, one that helps heal the Earth, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures rather than destroying them.” –Brian McLaren1 Stories have a…
“Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation. As Lacan put it, capitalism is the discourse or algorithm in which, instead of communicating to another person as a person, we are forced to negotiate through cloudy signifiers. We are workers relating to other workers in an environment mediated by…
“As people who have been shaped by the current empire–first the European, and then Euro-American, and then the global economic empire that we’re a part of now–we have to realize our survival now depends on disentangling our identities from the values and assumptions of this empire.“ –Brian McLaren The above quote comes from an interview…
“In her 1990 classic, The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams connects the oppression of women to the oppression of non-human animals by examining the cultural roles and meaning of meat. She first identifies the association between meat and masculinity, noting how men consume the lion’s share of meat while women, due to various…
“Emmanuel Daniel (ED): Now, how would you apply your book, when you open the newspaper in the morning, and you read some of these issues coming out? What would you like to see China do? What would you like to see the West do? It shouldn’t be just capitulating that China owns the South China…