Pratt BFA Communications Design Thesis

Yaewon Kim Graphic Design

New City

Branding
Climate Change
Environmental Graphics
Experience
Identity Design
Sustainability

I will be designing a new city identity for a planet after Earth with the second official language, responding to current days’ issues on multiculturalism and environmentalism. I will be using images and other universally communicative elements such as colors, punctuations, gestures, and numbers to establish a universal second language that is visual.

I will also be case-studying city branding to learn how various visual elements found in an urban setting, monuments, and signages, for example, define a city identity. The constructed visual language will be used in the city branding, in various applications. I will also apply the design to imagining urban infrastructure that addresses the new citizens’ social and environmental needs. I will be researching into the works related to environmentalism done by indigenous people to possibly discover the errors of the western-centric system.

In our era of environmental crisis, I feel that migrating to a new habitable planet after Earth has become more of a realistic possibility. Working within this imagined context, I want to challenge our current notions of communications through the lens of multiculturalism and environmentalism. The environmental crisis and its causes are inextricably rooted in the geo-political, socio-cultural, and economic conditions which vary widely across the globe. Thus, it is paramount that we approach the crisis from a globally inclusive perspective by prioritizing close communications and cooperation on a global scale. I have often felt, however, that the mainstream environmental movement, based primarily on western-centric economic and scientific models, does not fully represent the global consensus. In other words, it fails to represent the marginalized groups such as the indigenous people -whose unique cultural perspectives have focused more on the fundamental connections between humans and nature. By exploring the cultures and histories of marginalized groups, I wish to create designs that embody these multicultural components for advancing a more globally inclusive case for environmentalism.

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