World Building
Identity is a multi-faceted ordeal: race, religion, socioeconomic status, health, gender, sexual orientation to name a few. And there are many more categories that fit under the great identity umbrella. A good portion of these traits cannot be seen, they are felt, heard, thought. However, what if you could see every part of your identity summed up in one trait?
We built a world in which that is the case. From the time you are born until you complete adolescence around age 20, your skin color changes. People are born with all colors, which combined together is the equivalent of a semi-translucent white. As individuals grow to experience feelings and emotions, their skin starts changing colors. The rite of passage in this world is the solidification of your color. When the individual has their color solidify, they are not able to change it anymore, and that color will define his place in society. There is a second-rate class of citizens whose color never solidifies, they are known as Prisms. This caste is seen as inferior because they wear their thoughts, emotions, feelings, and experiences in dramatic, prismatic ways. This makes them hard to hire, harder to befriend, and harder to trust. Becoming a prism is a thing of nightmares; a scare tactic to keep children in line.
To showcase this culture, we chose three artifacts: a drug elimination campaign poster, a radio advertisement, and a blog post. The anti-drug campaign poster shows us the community’s commitment to saving the population from suffering due to illegal drugs. Color drugs, is a way to change the individual solid color to become better accepted. However, most of them end up losing their own colors and who they are in the process. This artifact correlates to our own society as people does not feel accepted; drugs, vicius and other harmful things became their escape of reality.
The radio advertisement, like many that pop-up on free music-streaming platforms, allows citizens the opportunity to seek help in coming to terms with an evolving personality within the restriction of their skin color. This is reminiscent of addiction recovery and depression support group advertisements that one would see in our world. Our goal with this artifact is to criticize the idea that individuals can only be one color. People are complex, their whole being can’t be defined by only one simple characteristic like the color of their skin.
The blog post unveils the experiences of our outcast Prism culture, subjugated by their solid-color betters, fallen prey to discrimination. Like in our society, these are the marginalized people that can’t fit in and often have to face prejudice.
This colorful world mirrors our own reality of visual prejudices. As Julian Bleeker states in his short essay Design Fiction “…fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, creates prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life based on the creative insights of the author. Designed objects — or designed fictions — can be understood similarly. They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop...”
We label people into boxes, punishing them forever for being who they are. We marginalize, we use the fear we create to develop false, harsh ideologies of how to treat others. In the name of unity, conformity, we have fallen prey to exclusion. Overcoming this obstacle is difficult; if only it were as easy as taking a self-help course like Color My Mind.
Radio Sound file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2xGQGma6do5XzNLbkRHSWZCVlU/view?usp=drive_web
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