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===== Des 22: World Building =====

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While graphic design has long been a component in world creation – from the branding of nations, to the mythologizing of corporate brands – signs, symbols, and narrative have taken on increasing potential in shaping our day-to-day reality(ies). With the evaporation of a mono-culture, and the potential for individuals to cultivate social and information bubbles, the motivation and need for “world” creation through graphic design has taken on increased interest. Furthermore, breakthroughs in image creation and manipulation tools that blur reality and fiction increases our ability to world-build.

The opportunity and pressure for individuals to inhabit multiple “worlds” feels like an inevitably of culture today. From the top down effort by corporations to brand their IP into immersive “universes”, to the accessibility for individuals to spin up their own online communities, to innovations in artificial intelligence and simulations, our one world reveals a complex system of competing “realities”. Within a social order that funnels money to the top 1%, the conditions are ripe for misinformation, self-isolation, and rational delusion.

This class will explore the role that signs, symbols, and visual story-telling play in constructing these realities. We will work together to identify both the potential and limits that graphic design can play in creating “worlds”, and the agency that individuals and small collectives can gain using these strategies given the complex and uneven distribution of resources and knowledge within these systems. The goal of this class isn’t to invent worlds out of nothing but whole cloth, and instead to see how graphic designers interpret and rebuild our surroundings with our own idiosyncratic motivations, beliefs, and tendencies, to create something new. And in the process, reconsider and comment on an existing situation.

**Class Participants**

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