It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the global challenges set before us. From climate change, to political and social unrest, to economic and social injustice, each of us has a responsibility to step up and consider how our design affects the products and experiences we create. Design can no longer afford to be used as an afterthought in any organization, and I would encourage all designers to take more proactive steps to redefine their roles beyond design to that of conscious and ethical decision makers.
Design can inspire collaborations and solutions that confront these challenges and encourage audiences to take note of things that really matter. Design can highlight sustainable solutions, fight systematic biases, and inspire thoughtful urban planning, among countless other applications.
Annie: The Grand Budapest Hotel graphics
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/annie-atkins-grand-budapest-hotel
Some props that only shows several seconds have been designed with so much time and effort, such as the postage stamps, the key and cake box.
"We’re not always designing for the cinema audience, sometimes it’s purely for the director and actors,” Annie explains. “Film sets don’t look like film sets – they’re full of lights and people standing round in North Face jackets drinking coffee so everything we can do to make the experience more authentic for the actors, we do it. We’re building this world brick by brick and if that means stamps, then that’s what it means.”
I think by designing every single prop, the designer were actually building the world. This is similiar with our project, which is to imagine a state that doesn’t exist and design a series of “props” for it. Annie designs props such as stamps, cake box, keys, newspapers…to make audience and artists believe the exist of the world, so their experience would be more real and vivid.
Norway new passport design
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/nov/17/norway-new-passport-design
The design of the passport is successful because Norway’s unique minimalist aesthetic has been applied as a strong visual language and national identity. And I love how Norway’s natural landscapes are depicted in fine likes and shades, which is another strong visual element to show Norway’s identity.
“All Norwegians are so connected to nature, it’s a very strong part of our history and defines us as a country,” says Gørill Kvamme of Neue, who explains that the minimal concept came from seeking to find the “essence of something”.
“It represents the vast variety of nature and landscapes you find in Norway … which makes it relevant to all of us whether you have always lived there or just received your citizenship.”
As Kvamme says: “Design has a natural role in helping express what country or culture you are a part of.”
The way how the designers connect Norway’s national characters with their design has inspired me a lot on how to design things for my state. It is significant to clarify my state’s unique identity and visualization, after which I can find the most potential & strong elements to develop into design language.
For extra functions and material created in this passport, when shone under UV light, the landscapes within the pages transform to show the northern lights in the night sky, a magical touch that adds a deeper sense of intrigue to the already striking document. This makes me think about adding some physical features related to my concept communication. It doesn’t have to be a “book” as other passports. In which way it will be presented should depend on what the state looks like.
The flag by German designer Timo Lenzen features two hands nearly touching – a reference to Michelangelo's painting The Creation of Adam, where God and Adam's hands are reaching to one another.
"The Mars colony will forget about powerful rulers and gods, they will erase all those iconic religious figures," explained Lenzen. "What's left is just a gesture, a disembodied glove which can be worn by anyone."
HANDS ON WITH A VISION
For Pledges of Allegiance, Reyes offers the flag of the pUN: The People’s United Nations, an experimental conference that applies tools and resources from social psychology, theater, art, and conflict resolution to geopolitics. Unlike the real UN, where delegates are appointed by states and are career diplomats, the people’s UN welcomes individuals who are connected by family ties or by birth to the nations represented at the UN. To date, pUN has gathered individuals from over 160 different countries. The first encounter took place in 2013 in NYC, and was followed by convenings in Los Angeles in 2014 and in Kanazawa Japan in 2015.
Reyes writes: “The flag of pUN is inspired by the hamsa (literally, “five” in Arabic). This right palm with an eye at the center of it has been a symbol of protection across cultures and millennia. Originating in Africa, the hamsa predates Christianity and Islam. Workers’ and peoples’ movements have often been represented by a hand, sometimes holding a tool or closed in a fist. Here, the hand is open. Rather than signaling ‘stop’ with all fingers together, its fingers are spread in a salute. This benignant hand placed over an orb is meant to signal our mission to protect the planet. And here, its five fingers represent the world’s five populated continents. pUN’s motto is ‘Hands-on with a vision.’ Join us.”
http://creativetime.org/projects/pledgesofallegiance/pedro-reyes/
BAUHAUS
I think Minimalism is suitable to be the “key tone” of my state, and I find the geometric, functional and modern sense of Bauhaus is perfect to apply to my state.
Herbert Bayer
SEALAND
SEALAND
It’s on Roughs Tower, an anti-aircraft platform dating from Second World War that was claimed as a Sovereign Principality by Roy Bates in 1967. Bates printed currency (the Sealand dollar), stamps and passports, and named himself Prince Roy. His wife is Princess Joan. It’s interesting because the whole idea of Sealand was basically a gift to his wife.
http://eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-floating-signifier-text-in-full
In this article, Sealand is described to be a floating signifier.
When it comes to identity the biggest significant difference between a nation’s identity and a brand identity is time. It’s about longevity.
Meaningless in itself, its content depends upon its relationship to the other expressions around it. Which is what a brand is: a floating signifier.
This is a series of logos, symbols, stamps and heraldry for a space that blurs the boundaries between the conceptual, the virtual and the real. Which is what a brand is.
It is a self-claimed country and it is significant to establish its own identity to be a country. Because the concept of “country” itself is not actually exists. The country exists when we believe its existence.
Every nation, in a political philosophy stretching at least as far back as Plato’s Republic, is built on a ‘founding myth’, a birth story that everyone believes in whether they know its real or not.
What the writer says in the article makes me realised the important role of brand and identity, it works in the invisible space between the individual and the universal. I then have to figure out my state’s “brand” as well, using continuous visual language and elements to make people believe its existence. What is more, I agree that every country is built on a “founding myth”, but it may not work for my state. Instead of building a permanent country, my state is like a land where people can come to whenever they want to run away from noisy world or complex relationships. It’s totally voluntary and the citizenship is temporary.
REPUBLIC OF SEBORGA
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwpvwx/republique-du-saugeais-interview-louis-perrey-938
Right. Would you like to acquire real independence?
Oh no, I don't think so, that would be hard. We are in contact with all these free communities or republics or micronations, but it's not for us. If it was easily done, we would do it, but we have to live. We pay our taxes in France, of course.
Is there a "Saugète" identity?
Ah yes, yes, yes! First of all, we've got our national anthem which dates back to 1910, and the lyrics are in "Sauget." Saugeais was recognized by a papal bull in 1199. Pope Innocent III recognized the independence of the monks living in the region, after colonists arrived. These guys came mostly from Savoie, so a dialect was created that is still spoken by some old people.
Finally, how serious is all this?
It is undeniable that Saugeais exists. We've got our own dialect and our own national anthem. But, well, our main aim is to promote the country.
The republic was founded as a joke between the prefect of Doubs and a restaurant owner who was to become Saugeais's first president in 1947. The place is a bit more easygoing than your traditional country —the tourist office praises the Saugeais national anthem for its sense of "humour and irony", and one president was been elected by an applause meter—and the Saugets are basically a group of elderly people who took advantage of a joke to institutionalize a community and attract a few tourists.
I think this country has something similar to my state because of its sense of humor and irony, especially their “whatever” attitude towards being approved by other countries.
Jewel Box of SEALAND
The Meta Haven design team regards its proposals as a method to develop a visual mythology for the Principality of Sealand.
The ‘Jewel Box’, as the proposal is called, consists of found images, weaved together into symbols with a narrative relation to the history and meaning of Sealand. The different designs go into such notions as islands and utopias, scandals in the network economy, piracy, search engines, fraudulent representations of the Principality and their alleged connections, and a mathematical figure resembling Sealand’s host platform.
Liberland
DATABASE
At the inception of Bitcoin and, therefore, the block ecosystem that permeates, there is a decentralized virtual infrastructure of consensus that breaks the old paradigm of centralized consensus — i.e. when one central database is used to rule transaction validity. A decentralized scheme, on which the bitcoin protocol is based, transfers authority and trust to a decentralized virtual network and enables its nodes to continuously and sequentially record transactions on a public “block,” creating a unique “chain”: this is the inception and keywords genesis for blockchain.
Each successive virtual block contains a “hash” (a unique fingerprint) of the previous code; therefore, cryptography (via hash codes) is used to secure the authentication of the transaction source and removes the need for a central intermediary. The combination of cryptography and blockchain technology together ensures there is never a duplicate recording of the same transaction.
A blockchain is a meta database where you store any data semi-publicly in a linear container space (the block). Anyone can verify that you’ve placed that information because the container has a given signature on it, but only the person that created that bloc or a program can unlock what’s inside the container because only that person holds the private keys to that data, securely.
So, the blockchain is sort of a database, except that part of the information stored — its “header” — is available to the public. Here the public, of course, means a computer scientist or software engineer, knowing how to use it and how to access its APIs and different flows.
he blockchain can also be seen as a software design approach that binds a number of peer computers together that commonly obey the same “consensus” process for releasing or recording what information they hold, and where all related interactions are verified by cryptography.
MAZE
I find the geometric sense and the feeling of being disconnected and isolated in Maze are suitable for my state. The streets and public sections are straight and being seperated from each other.