Brief:
"Take a graphic design interest that you are familiar with and investigate how the idea can be improved, disrupted or retold through a shift of application.
This might be an opposing media or environment ( e.g from book to installation, packaging to performance) or an opposing time or fictional future (e.g. speculative design). You can tell the story of your idea in any medium, but ensure the shift you make with your project is apparent, courageous and driven by risk and a rationale."
Process:
For this project, I looked at the role that graphic designers play in consumerism and considered ways of using design to disrupt consumerism rather than further it.
For my final output, I chose packaging design as my medium as I deemed it the most relevant design output with regards to consumerism.
Thinking about how design works to reduce consumerism, I considered what we do for those products which we have made a legal decision to reduce our consumption of. In 2016 the UK government introduced a law that requires all tobacco packaging in Great Britain to follow guidelines for ‘plain packaging’.
This removal of branding and carefully designed packaging was a move by the government to discourage the purchase of such products on the basis of health. I applied the government's packaging guidelines for tobacco products to the packaging of three large companies - featuring warnings about the effects of consuming these products.
