A reflective piece by Inês Botequilha.I’m a Graphic and Media Design student at London College of Communication and currently interning in an Artificial Intelligence startup in Barcelona, Spain. By experiencing new things and getting to know lots of new people, I have been on a fruitful discovery of new perspectives regarding how other people see the world and the impact it has on me. This question is very interesting to respond to and relates a lot to my ongoing experience here in Barcelona, as it is a very unique and diverse city in which we can get to know tons of different people with different ideals which has been very prolific to me in terms of my perspective regarding everything, specially the ideals the Anti-Design culture stands for. This pandemic has made us more conscious of the world that surrounds us. By spending so much time at home, we have learned to start paying attention to matters we haven’t before. As we weren’t caught up in the rush of our previous daily lives with loads of activities and schedules, we were allowed to finally stop and start subverting our daily norms. These new perspectives against over-conceptualized things in our lives have a lot to do with the concept of Anti-Design which is starting to shape our society and become more and more of a topic nowadays. The Anti-Design movement questioned society norms and used strong colours, scale distortion and lots of irony. By striving for uniqueness, anti-designers want to “do-it-wrong” and backwards to prove us that sometimes being different and anarchic in our choices can have the most honest and successful pathway for everyone and applying this to design is starting to reformulate our beliefs and the so called “trends”. Our Modernism followed the idea that objects have to be consistent and permanent, Anti-Designers feel objects should be temporary, as quick to throw away and replaced by something new and more functional, as things don’t have to be developed the same way and following the same style and norms. Also, relating to the concept of sustainability, which is very addressed nowadays, as things should be created considering their “end”, so if we keep in mind that things are temporary and not permanent is much more easy to create innovating things with a sustainable end. This pushes us to consumerism, but a healthy one, where we think about what we’re buying and not doing it just because an influencer posted it or it was on sale. By bringing up consumerism and sustainability, it immediately reminds me of its relation to fashion, which is an area that is being very influenced by the “anti” culture. The concept of questioning the “authenticity and status quo of fashion itself” and an “opposition to the fashion establishment” (Not Just a Label, 2014) is called Anti-Fashion. This is a field where stylists and designers are obeyed to create “never-before-seen” pieces and trends, so it couldn’t have more to do with anti-design. By bringing up the terms consumerism and sustainability when talking about Anti-Fashion, I meant that the mindset of things not being permanent and always searching to innovate has a lot to do with making environmentally friendly fashion choices. This means we should choose sustainable ways of producing it, by using renewable materials and reuse others. Anti-Fashion (2014) Available at: https://www.notjustalabel.com/editorial/anti-fashion Deconstruction of second-hand pieces or “upcycling” is a good example of how anti-design can relate to more sustainable choices, by creating new “crazy” pieces through existing garments. “Upcycling is situated as a counter cultural way of working as it contradicts conventions of fashion design and fashion education, demanding that the design process begins with ready-made, second hand garments.” (Monasterios-Tan, 2019) which means we can find this rebellious culture in almost every new concept created nowadays, because, as I said previously, we started subverting our daily norms and now we want to change them and question them in almost everything we do, specially considering the term sustainability. Besides furniture, magazines, fashion, décor and other areas, there’s one, very related to us in which the anti-design culture has started to express itself on. Graphic design has a lot of rules, grids and structures we’ve always had to obey and they are starting to be broken by this revolutionary “new” culture. “Design is an art form, and creativity is defined by curiosity, exploration, and experimentation. Anti-Design (2020) Available at: https://www.madewithover.com/trends-copy/anti-design
The artistic spirit will always wriggle away from safe spaces.” (Over, 2020) and this is what has been defining art throughout the years so, us graphic designers must be able to learn the basics and principles of design which remain to be important so we can make something that doesn’t look “terrible” and apply all this imagination and creativity we have. With this we can say that “confident designers can venture far out to sea, but they remember to never lose sight of the lighthouse” (Over, 2020), because besides this new expression of “rebellion” to the rules and trust in the authenticity of things, we remain to unconsciously have aesthetical norms in our brains which allow us to be confident, but also know the rules before we decide to “break them”. In conclusion, the anti-design culture relates a lot with what we’ve been pursuing since this pandemic started, to shake things up and to look beyond conventional, it “challenged the materiality of life as we knew it, creating new domains of the sensible that brought into view human and non-human actors that were previously invisible or neglected” (Adams, Barbara; Marenko, Betti; Traganou, Jilly; 2021). By being confined at home, our attention has started to demand different and unexpected things, not what we were used to before and during our “3 months stay” at home highlighting the anti-principles of not pursuing perfection or what already existed, but more interesting and authentic domains applying this to everything in our lives, including the examples I gave of fashion and graphic design. So, as Obirek (2017) said, “anti-design is your recipe for attention for the next couple of years to come as it can fit any mood you’re trying to produce”. References Monasterios-Tan, Daniela (2019) ‘Sustainable design as Anti Fashion’ Cumulus Conference Proceedings Bogotá 2019: The Design After Cumulus, Bogotá, 2019 Available at: https://www.academia.edu/43143136/Sustainable_design_as_Anti_Fashion Ban, Lavinia (2014) Anti-Fashion Available at: https://www.notjustalabel.com/editorial/anti-fashion Over (2020) Anti-Design Available at: https://www.madewithover.com/trends-copy/anti-design Adams, Barbara; Marenko, Betti; Traganou, Jilly (2021) ‘Design in the Pandemic: Dispatches from the Early Months’, The Journal of Design Studies Forum, Volume 13, Issue 1. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2021.1873667 Obirek, Simon (2017) Let’s talk about anti-design Available at: https://blog.prototypr.io/lets-talk-about-anti-design-ea59798e0791
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