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Thank you for the intro Kate.

Are you planning on bringing your interests of comics/writing stories into this project? If so have a look at Speculative Everything by Dunn & Raby for context. I’d also like you to find design examples of people working with your theme and analyse their design choices. You’re a strong image maker, can you illustrate a speculative fiction of poverty?

Considerations below:

- Poverty is not based on 'luck', but born from colonial and capitalist systems of extraction and oppression which makes your metaphor of poker incorrect.

- Your slides suggest you are going to visualise a metaphor for poverty through poker. Avoid metaphors as they will not offer you a critical, post-graduate level of exploration. Instead use design to research into other systems of value. How many can you find/catalogue into a research document?

- I would also like you to narrow your theme. Poverty of what? Money? Time? Culture? Education? etc. When you have this focus, research from multiples perspectives. Native and indigenous people all over the world have varying alternative systems to distribute, and even define, value.

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Thank you for the intro Swany.

Your research focus and area is very interesting, and feels already like a postgraduate area of research.

You talk about repetition/homogenisation as a negative but I wonder if you can turn it into a means to challenge conformity? For example, by repeating creative processes, do you always get the same result? I’ve included some examples below which use repetition in an iterative way.

Your research is very interesting, but what do you want to say?

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Thank you for the intro Pearl.

These are very interesting key words, but I will need more context during Friday’s tutorial. What is it about abbreviation and deconstructive typography you are interested in? How it is created? How it communicates? Vernacular of a place? There are many different directions you can take this, therefore I cannot offer suggestions or references at this time.

You mention your interest in analogue film photography, can you incorporate this into your research? Give people disposable cameras to document your theme through their eyes and see how others interpret your focus.

You also mention you love for making books – keep practising and looking into book design that already exists/is being made currently, this is the only way to improve these skills.

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Zach Lieberman creates endless static and animated forms through coding. His explorations in algorithmic and generative practices have even led to the co-creation of the openFrameworks platform and the School for Poetic Computation.

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(note: this article has a fair number of images and animated gifs. Just an FYI if you are on mobile or slower connection.)
In 2016 I started an experiment of doing daily sketches in the form of short animations posted on instagram. In these sketches I tried out different visual ideas involving geometry, animation, gesture and graphic form. I had no idea what to expect but it felt like a good new years resolution and nice way to experiment with some ideas I had been thinking about. I was inspired by folks like Reza Ali who were doing daily sketches at the time and thought, I should do this.

My step-daughter was having trouble falling asleep by herself at the time and so I would hang out in her room, read some books and then as she tried to sleep, I'd code a sketch and in the morning show it to her. At the beginning of the year she was really positive, "that's hypnotizing me!" but after a while she started to offer more criticism, "you should try color" or "that looks a little too crazy to me" She pushed me in different directions. I was happy to show her that art making is daily work and small discoveries.

I thought I would take some time and write down things that I discovered and played with throughout the year. I'll start with my process of producing the videos, my approach and talk about the areas I explored.

One of the things I wanted was to make sure that posting these sketches was as simple and painless as possible. Most of my sketches are coded in openFrameworks (using Xcode) and a few use paper.js. My workflow is really simple:

use quicktime screen recorder to grab a square recording, usually larger than the 640x640 target resolution.

trim the quicktime recording to a good length (usually less then 60 seconds) and save out the file.

use ffmpeg to covert the file. I use the following command line:

ffmpeg -i INPUT.mov -crf 10 -vf "scale=640:640, setpts=1.0*PTS" -c:a copy -tune grain OUTPUT.mov note, I change the input and output files names. I also adjust the CRF value to try to keep the bitrate around 4000-5000 kbits. Also the 1.0 in setpts= line is for speed change, if I want to make the movie faster I adjust this.
I use airdrop to copy the video over to my phone.

Finally I have one folder on my hard drive called "everyday". It's about 100 GB now, and basically any screenshot or video of the sketching goes there. It's not very well organized but it's really useful - if I sort it chronologically, I can see my progression really clearly and even retrace my steps if need be.

My naming scheme is increadible

As a side note, the timeline of many of my movies look pretty cool :)

My general approach is to settle on an idea for anywhere from a week to a month and to push that idea in different directions. I usually try to pose a problem "how would I attach things to the contour of a body as it moves?", "how would I make this blob turn into a letter", and the sketches are my attempt at solution. Sometimes the sketches show me working through the idea, sometimes they push what can happen with the solution.

The sketches are the opposite of work to me, so I try to be totally un-work like. I don't use github, I don't keep code clean, I just make and record without thinking very carefully about anything. I sketch up until the point I think it's interesting, record it, post it and clock out. It's the opposite of how I approach commercial work. When I sketch I want to work as messy and mindlessly as possible - I don't plan, I just see where the wind blows.

I try to work for about 30 minutes on a sketch. It doesn't always work that way, but in general I try to keep the time involvement as minimal as possible - I have other work to do, etc and I want this to be for fun more than anything else. Sometimes if I have 15 minutes free here or there, I might open up the last sketch again and try to make a variation of push things in a different direction. With shaders, small changes can have a huge effect, so I often times would change even just a few variables and have a new sketch. Lately I've taken to using instagram stories and doing screen recording as I work as a way of sharing those different changes.

Folks ask me if I open source this work. At the moment, I haven't, mostly because these sketches feel like they are in early states and I don't yet know what they will become. However, when people ask technical questions, I do my best to answer them and explain exactly what I am doing and I also make myself available once a week for open office hours. I am still honestly struggling with this - I am a strong believer in open source but I don't know the best way to integrate this into sketching without it changing the nature of what I do or me feeling un-afraid to share ideas I don't fully understand yet. It's an open question and as I head into 2017 I may revisit this.

Once I post a sketch, I find it's useful to monitor how it was received. I am curious about the like to view ratio, the comments people leave and I find it helps gauge how other people see my work. It's interesting to see when I have an idea that I really love that doesn't connect with people or when there's something people pick up on that I don't think as highly of. A lot of times, as an artist, I feel like we're struggling to find our frequencies and what resonates with the frequencies of the world. This act of sketching is a kind of tuning of these frequencies, trying things that are more harmonious, trying things which are more discordant and generally getting a feel for how others see your work.

These sketches are like diary entries. When I think back to a sketch, I sometimes remember the specific day, where I was, what the temperature was like, what I was thinking about at the time. I get nostalgic just poking through them. They mark my moods and capture all kinds of things in them - it's really surprising.

Finally, I had a set of simple rules:

avoid over-used algorithms like delauny triangulation or reaction diffusion in favor of more experimental things.

avoid random (and to a lesser sense, noise) as much as possible in favor of using mathmatical functions like sin() and tan()

find sources of inspiration and try to re-code them (for example, I saw this and made this which later led to this)

don't take requests or feedback too seriously, just try to develop my own personal intuition. My response to requests was always, "dj doesn't take requests"

don't be afraid to repeat myself or tweak a sketch and repost it

post the first thing I make that is good enough to share

surprise myself

My initial sketches were all around reflection - what it looks like when light bounces off of surfaces, reflects and refracts, and the kinds of forms that emerge.

Last December, I had made an interactive project called reflection studies where I invited people to play with light interactively using laser cut shapes. I was inspired by Micah Elizabeth Scott's Zen Photon Garden and I was wondering what an interactive version of a light simulation would look like.

My first instagram sketch had a new years greeting for people. I used the rotating light to line up with walls to reflect off to make out words. To create the text, I use a hershey font and calculated where to put walls to make the lines of the text. I really like how the message resolves:

One of the nice things about starting with reflection for the sketching is that I had a very limited number of choices to make for each sketch. I had to decide where the light was coming from and where the walls for the light to bounce off go. That's it.

Another nice challenge is that line drawing animations compress terribly, so I kind of cut my teeth with the some of the worst possible material and later as I moved to other topics I had a much better sense of how to manage compression.

Finally, when I started the year instagram had a 15 second limit on videos. I tend to use sin(time) in my animations and the nice thing about that is you can do one or two full cycles and a lot of my early animations are just simple loops.

Later I looked at refraction - what happens if the light bends as it hits a wall - and even added colored light. I moved from a hand crafted solution for fast light simulation (which used a raster image / look up tables, etc) to a more mathmatically precise method involving bounding view hierarchies (a technique used for ray-tracing)

I took these sketches and worked them into an update on the interactive version of this project, which I took to Panorama Music Festival and Signal Festival in Prague. I really enjoy the interactive version of this project, because to me it feels like people are basically playing with my sketchbook - the current version of the software has 12 different modes which each come from this daily sketching.

One thing I experimented with that I found really promising is light interacting with the human body. I'd like to do live full body experiments with this

One of the things I like about the light reflection is that it got me excited about very simple geometry - things like squares and triangles felt really different when they are part of light simulation then if you just draw them with solid pixels. For example, here are a set of horizontal and vertical lines, but when we bounce light off of them, there's a lot of kinectic energy that's revealed.

For example, here's a simple sketch that has a grid of triangles - I like how weird and organic forms emerge from this pattern and repetition.

At some point after a period of sketching light I got tired of the lack of color. I moved to blobs. A blob is a cell, a closed form, that moves in an organic and lifelike way.

I remember many years ago seeing processing sketches from Ryan Alexander and being amazed at how these forms he made in processing were moving, and through trial and error developed my own approach which is fairly straightforward:

connect particles with springs (and connect the last particle to the first particle, making a loop)

give the particles a repulsion force from each other that is proportional to distance (stronger force when closer) and has a maximum radius for interaction (i.e., if particles are beyond this distance, they don't have an impact on each other)

Because these blobs are based on physics, they have natural and pleasing motion. For colors I just chose a background color because of the name "peachpuff" and experimented with things that felt right.

I did a lot of experiments with shading - these blobs aren't 3d but rather, triangulated meshes, and I color the vertices based on the distance to the closest edge and the angle of the closest edge. This gives it 3d feel, but without being 3d. This idea of making things look 3d but not really 3d comes back again and again through my sketches.

I tried thing like putting images inside blobs and distorting the image based on how the blob moves:

There were some interesting discoveries, such as this sketch which connected two blobs to each other at the closest point (i.e., the points on blob A search for the closest points on blob B). I made this sketch almost on a whim, since something I was attempting that was hard wasn't working, and people really seemed to really like it.

When I saw that people liked, I was wondering, what is special about this? I felt like it might be the use of negative space, and so I started to explore that. Usually, most computer graphics are accretive (i.e. layering) and it seemed interesting to try to make visuals where the shapes you draw reveal worlds below. These sketches use Chris Baker's ofxClipper heavily.

Letters

I tried making the blobs turn into letters, and even exploring what it would be like to push them with my hands. To turn a blob into letters, it involves adding angle forces, so particles feel agular turning forces (if you think about each set of 3 particles as a hinge in the middle, where the middle particles is the pivot and the two particles on the outside have forces that open or close the hinge to change the angle to match the letter).

Offsets

I looked into offsetting these blobs. I got inspired by the visual language around the 1968 Olympics in mexico and tried to figure out how to take polygons and offset them so that they grow larger and larger.

First I worked on expanding the polygon based on normals - but it messed up really quickly and led to much self intersection. There's a mathmatical way of doing this (minowski sums) but I couldn't find a way to do many offsets fast. When I mentioned this problem to Golan Levin, he connected me with Bryce Summers, whose ofxScribbleSegmenter helped solve for self intersection of those polygon offsets and I was able to do offsets pretty fast:

These offsets proved really interesting - Sometimes I would stumble into looks that felt kind of 1960's design

Later I tried things like straight skeleton and distance images to get similar results - the straight skeleton is implemented in CGAL and I also used Stalgo. With the distance image ( example usage here), I used opencv and thresholded at different levels to get inner or outer contours.

At some point, I tried to make the blob 3d. My first attempt was to replicate the same physics in 3d. I took a primitive shape called an icoSphere (a sphere made out of triangles) and made each vertex of the icoSphere a particle, connected these particles by springs essentially recreating the icosphere's mesh, and used the same repulsion forces as the original 2d blobs . This created some interesting and weird shapes.

I tried things like slicing the 3d form into layers or having energy travel along nearby vertices.

Another approach to 3d was try to implement a kind of pseudo 3d - basically inflating the 2d shape based on it's distance from the edge. I was inspired by a project called Teddy, an experimental interface for making 2d drawings 3d. it produced interesting looks as well. My initial experiments looked more like baked cookies than real 3d :)

later I found a project called openTeddy and with that code, was able to integrate the ideas from the original Teddy paper into my sketches. The result were things that looked really curious and fascinating - they were much more controllable forms as well since the basis of the form was 2d.

Since they come from 2d, I could also use things like the contour of a body or hand and even make it 3d - it's great for making a michelin man:

I made the blob another way - instead of connecting particles, I tried connecting just circles (i.e., particles with a huge radius) and using these circles with larger radii, tracing around the circles to make the form.

This lead to all kinds of weird and organic shapes that moved the same as the previous blobs but look really different.

I found you could get interesting looks if you extended the shapes out, in a kind of pseudo 3d. I didn't use 3d, I just drew in 2d and used line line intersection and just drew lines and stopped them if they intersect the another line. This way of rending is kind of ridiculous, but it produces a very unique look.

In particular, this one really looked like a sea creature / Ernst Haeckel illustration:

Later I tried the same thing but using real 3d forms:

Another thing I experimented with was placing adjacent circles across a horizontal line, and tracing a them (i.e., following the top of one circle and connecting it to the bottom of the next circle) to make an alternating shape that felt like a kind of graphical wave. As you stack them, this produces 3d-like forms but it's just layers of waves that come from circles.

Circle Fitting

One of the interesting properties of circles is that you only need three points to define a circle. If the points are co-linear, the circle has an infinite radius. I found a small snippet of code to solve for the position and radius of the circle based on these three points and I did a variety of sketches based on that.

I used this approach for other sketches - I like how you you can see / find circles in anything.

Later in the year, I discovered Dubin's curve, a technique for path planning which can connect two points with a start and end angle via a set of circles - it's used for example to steer elements that can only turn a certain amount.

For years I have been obsessed with Juerg Lehni's Hektor robot and the visual language around it but I didn't know how to make smooth motion planning between segments. Dubin's curves gave me some avenues to explore.

As I was working on the blobby shapes, I kept thinking about the body as a shape and how I could use it in my sketches. I started first with hand shapes, but then moved into bodies. I found two movies from this page Theo Watson put together with "test" opencv movies. These two videos became my "Lenna" - I used these contours for a ton of different sketches. One nice thing about always using the same video was that I got to know it really well and understand the differences in my visuals better since the input was always the same.

I tried different things on this shape, like polygon offsets:

One of the problems I wanted to solve is attaching elements to the contour across multiple frames. When you use openCv to turn a blob into a polyline, it can return a variable number of points every frame and the first point changes from frame to frame. This makes it hard to attach anything to the contour because it shifts so much from frame to frame. My solution was to resample the contour so it always has the same number of points every frame, and then to compare the current frames contour with the previous contour to figure where to put the zero position (start) of the polyline. One way to visualize this is two rubber bands with a single dark mark on each one, I rotate one until the mark matches with the other ones mark.

I was inspired by things like Nick Cave's sound suits, and Oskar Schlemmer's costumes, and I started designing a series of costumes - elements attached to and moving around the body.

Sometimes my sketches with the body came from really simple mechanism - For example, I was inpired by these stacked circles from Keetra Dean Dixon and JK Keller.

Inspired by this, I took the contour and looked at where horizontal lines would intersect it (using line line intersection across all the lines in the contour). Any line moving aross the contour will intersect in some multiple of 2 times, 0 if it's below or above the body, 2 times on the shoulders for example, 4 times on the legs in the left two pictures, etc. I took those intersections and turned each set of 2 into circles, which I rotated in 3d slightly. The result is a body which looked like a stack of circles:

It looked interesting when you rotate around it - I love it when the body breaks apart and reforms:

Another thing I really fell in love with is turning the body into 3d forms by simple extruding or rotating the points like a lathe:

I also explored 3d point sets. You can find BVH motion capture data online, and it's pretty easy to load this into openFrameworks. I found a walk cycle and on the anniversary of my father's death it seemed really appropriate to use this solitary walking figure as a way to explore my feelings - I was unsure how to process them. I was feeling really alone those days and this solitary set of 16 points walking really resonated with me.

As I was experimenting with the using the distance images from openCV to make polygon offsets, I discovered a whole field of work around signed distance fields which got me intrigued with using shaders for computing distances. I could pass in a set of points, and the shader would compute for every pixel the distance to all the points and color that pixel based on inverse proportionality. As I experimented with things like coefficients or raising the distance to a power, I started to see shapes go in and out of focus

I was fascinated in particular with the kind of milky light you could get - here I took lines from the body contour and passed them to the shader

If you take the same distance formula but you use sin or tan with it as input in the shader, you can get some interesting results. Most of these are shader explorations and there's something I find deeply meditative about programming shaders vs traditional coding. It's more improvisational and it feels quite close to making math visible. I've been really inspired by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe's Book of Shaders and I found it really helpful as a reference for these explorations

Probably one of the most exciting aspects of doing the sketching has been the collaborations that have emerged. I thought I'd discuss a few of them.

I was approached by the New York Times this summer to use a variation on one of the sketches I made which stretched typography. In this sketch I examining letter forms and found good "slice points" where I could cut the letter and extend the slice I've made, distorting (but not breaking) the letter form.

We use this to illustrate a story about the influences on the maltese language.

In the fall, South Bank Center and the publishers of Margaret Atwood's new novel Hag-Seed reached out and asked if I'd be interested in making interactive animations based on the book and I jumped at the opportunity. The book involves a solitary figure who comes from the theatre world and for me it seemed really fitting to make animations that involve the body and typography.

One of the highlights of the year was watching Margaret Atwood dance with it at the South Bank Center, seeing her own words wrap around her silhouette.

In addition, I spent this fall as an "artist in residence" as the school for poetic computation, a school in NYC I help run, and while there, I collaborated with two artists I really admire.

The first was with David Mcleod, a phenomenal artist who primarily uses 3d tools to make hypnotic animation and forms. We experimented with taking the circular forms I had been experimenting with and I built a tool that exports them from openframeworks to alembic (using the amazing add-on from Satoru Higa, ofxAlembic) so he can open them in c4d.

Then David worked his magic on these forms and the result are really stunning.

Shantell Martin is an incredible artist who I've collaborated with before. For this experiment, Shantell made a set of drawings and I tried to figure out a good way to animate from one drawing to another. We used Kyle McDonald's ofxAssignment to figure out of the best match of line segments from one drawing to another:

and then used dubins curves to make the movement as seamless as possible. I had always wondered how to do an animation like this (i.e., how to have the lines of one drawing smoothly move to the lines of the next) and it was lovely to be able to see it happen.

Towards the end of the year, I had the chance to work with Daito Manabe / Rhizomatiks, for a project that was sponsored by Volvo - we used their life paint, a retroreflective spray paint, and made costumes that he and his partner wore on stage and I wrote software to track them - finding the lines in the costume and writing software that animated those, responding to the music.

We also took similar software and tried it with a group of dancers from Elevenplay. One of my favorite sketches was this one which fits circles between the dancers as they move.

Finally, I've been working with collaborating with my wife and partner Molmol to create costumes based on her sketches. We take the contour of a body from the kinect and find ways of attaching and manipulating hand drawn shapes which are attached. One of my favorite sketches we made together as a family.

After all this, I guess I want to say there is no conclusion. I'm quite glad I did this in 2016, thankful for the feedback and support I got, and I am excited to sketch in 2017. If you aren't already sketching, come join me!

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(note: this article has a fair number of images and animated gifs. Just an FYI if you are on mobile or slower connection.) In 2016 I started an experiment of doing daily sketches in the form of short animations posted on instagram. In these sketches I tried out different visual ideas involving geometry, animation, gesture and graphic form.

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Danielle Aubert exploited the grid structure and styling options built into Microsoft Excel to make visual compositions that challenge the software’s implicit values of productivity and optimization.

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Microsoft Excel is a program designed to track and compute information, but here I am using Excel as a drawing tool. These drawings are a part of a series that I executed on an irregular daily basis for 16 months. Each drawing is in a new 'worksheet,' which is automatically set up as a grid. The drawings were made by changing cell preferences for background color, fill pattern, and border styles and from time to time inserting 'comment' boxes and letters or words. Other manifestations of these drawings are 58 Days Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel as Rendered for Web and Animated Daily Excel Drawings. The book was published by Various Projects, in New York and was for sale at their shop, Project No. 8 or at the New Museum bookstore. (2005-2008)

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16 Months Worth of Drawings in Microsoft Excel : Danielle Aubert

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Microsoft Excel is a program designed to track and compute information, but here I am using Excel as a drawing tool. These drawings are a part of a series that I executed on an irregular daily basis for 16 months. Each drawing is in a new 'worksheet,' which is automatically set up as a grid.

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Martino Gamper’s project 100 Chairs in 100 Days is an exercise in improvisation that simultaneously raises critical questions about style, materiality, and mass production.

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100 Chairs in 100 Days by Martino Gamper

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City Gallery Wellington
Civic Square, Wellington, New Zealand
08 April - 13 August 2017

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This is a great start Kate, but you need a bit more clarity on what you are doing. Are you designing a game? Are you re-designing/disrupting existing games? I’m also eager for you to bring in your image making skills and interests in comics and writing. How might you do this?

Next steps [suggested research]:

- research into other types of games (card games, boardgames, verbal games, parlour games, arcade games, video games, etc.) and their ideological meaning (e.g. the monopoly board game)

- research into collective games (i.e. the participants work together to win the game collectively)

- you’ve focused your research on social structures of wealth, now spend some time looking into activists that disrupt them. Can you ‘disrupt’ a card game in a political way?

- research the term ‘gamification’

Next steps [suggested experiments]:

- create a series of designed disruptions for the card game (these could be additional rules, card, etc.?)

- document your friends/family playing the card game in multiple ways

- redesign the card game, considering scale, materials, and formats

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'Buy land - they aren't making it any more,' quipped Mark Twain. It's a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there.

The game's little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she'd lived to know just how influential today's twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.

Born in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. She was unmarried into her 40s, independent and proud of it, and made her point with a publicity stunt. Taking out a newspaper advertisement, she offered herself as a 'young woman American slave' for sale to the highest bidder. Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. 'We are not machines,' she said. 'Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.'

With her board game, Magie hoped to take on the capitalist system of property ownership (Credit: Getty Images)

In addition to confronting gender politics, Magie decided to take on the capitalist system of property ownership - this time not through a publicity stunt but in the form of a board game. The inspiration began with a book that her father, the anti-monopolist politician James Magie, had handed to her. In the pages of Henry George's classic, Progress and Poverty (1879), she encountered his conviction that 'the equal right of all men to use the land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence'.

Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces - poverty and progress - together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land's value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature's gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.

Determined to prove the merit of George's proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord's Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.

Under the 'Prosperity' set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George's policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the 'Monopolist' set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there - and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)

Monopoly's alternative rules were intended to show players how different approaches to property ownership can lead to different social outcomes (Credit: Getty Images)

The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a 'practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences' and hence to understand how different approaches to property ownership can lead to vastly different social outcomes. 'It might well have been called "The Game of Life",' remarked Magie, 'as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.'

The game was soon a hit among Left-wing intellectuals, on college campuses including the Wharton School, Harvard and Columbia, and also among Quaker communities, some of which modified the rules and redrew the board with street names from Atlantic City. Among the players of this Quaker adaptation was an unemployed man called Charles Darrow, who later sold such a modified version to the games company Parker Brothers as his own.

Once the game's true origins came to light, Parker Brothers bought up Magie's patent, but then re-launched the board game simply as Monopoly, and provided the eager public with just one set of rules: those that celebrate the triumph of one over all. Worse, they marketed it along with the claim that the game's inventor was Darrow, who they said had dreamed it up in the 1930s, sold it to Parker Brothers, and become a millionaire. It was a rags-to-riches fabrication that ironically exemplified Monopoly's implicit values: chase wealth and crush your opponents if you want to come out on top.

So next time someone invites you to join a game of Monopoly, here's a thought. As you set out piles for the Chance and Community Chest cards, establish a third pile for Land-Value Tax, to which every property owner must contribute each time they charge rent to a fellow player. How high should that land tax be? And how should the resulting tax receipts be distributed? Such questions will no doubt lead to fiery debate around the Monopoly board - but then that is exactly what Magie had always hoped for.
Kate Raworth is a senior visiting research associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute and a senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. She is the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

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'Buy land - they aren't making it any more,' quipped Mark Twain. It's a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there.

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From Suffragette teapots to protest robots, this exhibition was the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It demonstrated how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design.

Supported by Cockayne - Grants for the Arts, a donor-advised fund of The London Community Foundation

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From Suffragette teapots to protest robots, this exhibition was the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It demonstrated how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design.

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Fantastic start Pearl. Would it be useful to limit yourself to a single emoji? Or a small set? To narrow your focus right down.

Next steps [suggested research]:

- investigate where the common use of abbreviations in technology came from (limited bandwidth, limited space etc.)

- investigate the notion of a universal language (see Ellen Lupton’s Critical Way Finding essay)

- research/explore hidden ideologies in emojis (example I gave in class is the yellow emoji = default white)

Next steps [suggested experiments]:

- recording a day in emojis is a great idea

- could you also record your day in acronyms?

- think about how spoken language is being impacted by abbreviation – can you record conversations and look for evidence?

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Critical Wayfinding

Such icons participate in a broader phenomenon in the cultural landscape: the emergence of a hieroglyphics of communication, which overlays the contemporary experience of cities, buildings, products, and media with a code of repeatable, reduced icons, compacted chunks of information which collapse a verbal message into a visual mark. The expanding domain of this hieroglyphic speech poses subtle problems for designers in the next millennium: How can we create cross-cultural communication without flattening difference beneath the homogenizing force of a single dialect?

Perhaps these dubious achievements are what makes graphic design the black sheep of the design family. Graphic design lacks the spatial drama or presence or architecture and product design. Architectural criticism often contrasts the plenitude of architectural form with the one-dimensionality of "sign," "communication," "illustration," "anecdote," and "information"-the very modes of expression that graphic design traffics in.1

Like an over-eager, pimply-faced younger sibling, graphic design is what architecture never wants to be: namely, packaging, ornament, frame, and sign. Architecture says, "Experience, Space, Tactility, Drama, Eternity"...while graphic design says, "Can I help you? Do I look okay? Buy me, read me, eat me, drink me!"

Yet graphic design is a frame which makes spaces, places, and objects legible. Graphic design continually mediates contact with the environment. Signs, arrows, instructions, "you are here" maps, advertisements, and other kinds of information set up the conditions in which experience takes place. And this process of wayfinding-the term used by environmental graphic designers-is increasingly more visual than verbal. The semantic and visual reduction of international symbols-their concise generality-gives them their paradoxical status. They are simultaneously open and closed, vague and specific, ostensibly neutral and yet loaded with connotations and stylistic mannerisms.

Environmental signage is simultaneously there and not there-not really a "part of" the architecture, yet indispensable to its functions, its lived use. The signs that lead visitors to the Mona Lisa are like the frame around the painting: they direct attention to the object and yet are considered extrinsic to it. Graphic design-signage in particular-is largely a framing activity. Graphic design occupies the space between a product, building, or text, and its user. Graphic design is the margins of a book, the buttons of a boom box, the friendliness of a computer interface, or the paper wrapper on a tin can.

In common usage, the term "graphic" describes a high-contrast image: black against white, white against black. The silhouette is the dominant strategy behind the language of international pictures, suggesting an objective shadow of material reality, a schematic index of fact. The ideal of an international picture language has been part of modernist design since the 1920's, and reached the intensity of an obsession during the 1960's and 1970's. Sign systems, such as the Department of Transportation's 1974 symbol set, designed under the guidance of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, aspire to the semiotic consistency of a typeface.2 The quest for uniform symbols for public information parallels the rise of coherent corporate identity programs and the emergence of an international consumer hieroglyphics.3

Such civic and commercial marks signal the challenges of cross-cultural communication in the next millennium. For as the globe is rendered increasingly accessible by communication technologies and forces of economic consolidation, it is at the same time segmented by diverse national, racial, and ethnic identities. The contradictory mandate of designers in the 21st century is to create visual scripts which can communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers without flattening diversity into caricature. Differences must be maintained to counter the domination of what Herbert Marcuse has called "one-dimensional man," whose culture has been robbed of ambivalence and negativity in favor of a mass media capable of assimilating, and thus neutralizing, any form of cultural difference or dissent.4

International communication carries the dangers of homogeneity and hegemony alongside the hopeful promise of an integrated global village lined with universally legible street signs and uniformly available products. Designers working at the edge of the millennium are faced with the conflicting imperatives to both expand and contract these formal languages: to reach a diverse public without succumbing to the dangers of assimilation. The one-world, one-language ideal of heroic modernism is an untenable solution for design in the next century.

The simultaneous expansion and contraction of markets for products and media has encouraged the compression of messages. Visual, verbal, and aural texts-transmitted through print, television, film, radio, computers, products, and exhibitions-are increasingly reduced to a code of repeatable icons, or what we call a hieroglyphics of communication. These hieroglyphics punctuate daily life with a pattern of generalized, repeatable signs, marks which signal ownership or information.

Historically, hieroglyphs occupy the space between pictures and writing; it is the passage connecting the concrete depiction of objects with the abstract, mechanical coding of the alphabet. The hieroglyph marks the clash between the soft, continuous, flowing substance of visual experience and the hard, polarized, digitized articulations of writing. The power of the phonetic alphabet, in contrast with the older forms of the ideogram, lay in its ability to ignore the "ideas" or "meaning" of a language, and to represent only its material side-its sounds-disconnected from the objects and ideas that a language refers to. The alphabet, unlike the hieroglyphic, is blind: it is a neutral grid, an automated device capable of converting any word into a graphic mark, regardless of its referent.5

The alphabet claims to represent only the outside of a given language-its exterior envelope-rather than its interior content.6 The hieroglyphic script is the checkpoint between the mechanical abstraction of the alphabet and the vivid particularity of the image. In hieroglyphics, the specificity of pictures embeds itself in the schematic abstraction of the typographic sign. Through repetition and conventionalization, the picture enters the realm of writing. The soft becomes hard, the fluid becomes fixed, the concrete becomes abstract. In between these two extremes stands the hieroglyph, a rebus which is both silent and spoken, a full-bodied depiction of an idea and a standardized abstraction.

Modern communication has returned to the transitional medium of hieroglyph-writing. The logotype, the corporate symbol, and the international pictogram combine the generality of the typographic mark with the specificity of pictures. In corporate identity the image becomes the "personality" behind a mass-produced product, a sign of uniqueness stamped into an intrinsically multiple object. The fictional character "Betty Crocker." for example, is regularly updated by her image managers, who have enabled her features to slowly evolve over the decades while keeping her identity-her status as a proprietary symbol-intact. She is at once naturalistic and schematic, changing and fixed, a rendered portrait and a conventionalized mark.

How does the return of the hieroglyph affect everyday life? Writers from diverse ideological positions have described ways in which the media that supposedly "records" events have come to play a central role in shaping those events-sometimes initiating the event in the first place. From Daniel Boorstin's "pseudo-event" to Jean Baudrillard's "simulacrum" to Stuart Ewen's All Consuming Images, critics of culture have noted that representation has come to inhabit reality, not content to document it after the fact.7 This by-now familiar critique has attacked network television, mass-market publishing, advertising, and Hollywood film for substituting an endless stream of superficial images for the lost fullness of experience.

This diaphanous veil of commercial imagery is punctuated with a pattern of hieroglyphics, signs which are neither strictly image nor text but occupy a middle-ground between them. Such signs, whether generated in the name of private commerce or public information, are attempts to anchor or regulate the ongoing barrage of pictures and products. Like digital rocks in an analog stream, hieroglyphics guide the flow of communication by directing the interpretation of events, the consumption of goods, or the navigation of public spaces.

Baudrillard has critiqued the function of signs in contemporary media, arguing that they have organized reality into a reductive pattern of oppositions. Baudrillard describes how the symbolic plentitude of a concept is emptied when it becomes instrumental, when it is strictly coordinated against its semantic opposite. Baudrillard's example is the sun, which for non-industrialized cultures is a concept approached with considerable ambivalence: it is a source of destruction as well as growth. To this he contrasts the vacation sun of the tourist economy, which is "a completely positive sun,...source of happiness and euphoria, and as such...is significantly opposed to non-sun (rain, cold, bad weather)." The vacation sun results from a semiological reduction: the ambivalence of the sun is lost when opposed to the idea of non-sun. This yes/no, on/off operation of the sign is what Baudrillard describes as "semiological organization": the process through which signs are given a cultural value.8

A comparable pattern of semiological difference governs the cultural boundaries of sexual identity, a phenomenon inadvertently expressed in the official U.S. Department of Transportation travel symbols. The difference between male and female bathrooms is signified by the addition of a cultural mark to the generic human form: the fin-like extrusions representing the woman's dress. Rather than express the difference between male and female lavatories with an anatomical representation, as in these signs proposed by National Lampoon in the mid-1970's, the DOT design committee stayed with the already-conventional device of the fin-like party dress.

The semiotic pattern male/female disappears in other signs in the DOT system, however, where the male figure represents humanity in general, just as the word "man" becomes a generic title in many verbal contexts. The supposedly neutral pattern of linguistic oppositions breaks down in this particular sign, which happens to depict a service relationship between an employee and a consumer. The DOT sign system thus unwittingly brings home the fact that sexual relationships are determined not solely by biological fact, but also by culture customs, images, and structures of power.

The symbols used in commerce, information graphics, and environmental signage draw upon and reinforce dominant cultural ideas. With the rise of television journalism in the 1960's, pictograms became an important element of news graphics, where they provide symbolic logotypes for issues or events. In the television industry, such symbols are called "over-the-shoulders," referring to their ubiquitous location in the void behind a talking head. Over-the-shoulders draw upon a stock vocabulary of flags, maps, hearts, doves, and olive branches. "Over-the-shoulders" became visually more complex with the introduction of the Paint Box sytem in the 1980's; conceptually, however, they are virtually unchanged.

The idea of pictorial logos for news stories crossed over into print media in the late 1970's, when Nigel Holmes and Walter Bernard revamped Time to make it more competitive with television. Such logos continue to provide news events with a corporate identity. The 1970's also witnessed the renaissance of pictorial information graphics, or what Edward Tufte has called "chartoons," in which numbers are projected into entertainingly figurative scenarios.9 A pictographic chart from Time? showing an Arab "over a barrel" belies the supposed objectivity of journalistic statistics by resorting to racist caricature. The ethnic stereotype is itself a kind of hieroglyphic form, consisting of a set of conventionalized, exaggerated features.

The hieroglyph has also found its way into the verbal features of broadcast news. The ascendancy of the "sound byte" as the basic unit of News Speech reflects the media's increasing reliance on condensed chunks of information in favor of extended, linear discourse. The term "sound byte" couples the immateriality of speech with the materiality of a product-a bite-sized portion, a compacted blip of information.

The replacement of linear discourse with visual and verbal hieroglyphs in the news media is exemplified by the newspaper USA Today, which favors illustrations over text and serves up its articles in TV-sized portions. USA Today's "snapshot series" presents pictorial statistics on mass habits, supporting the publication's desire to be everybody's hometown paper by celebrating the uniformity of taste and canonizing the myth of a national consensus on such issues as how eggs should be prepared.10 USA Today came of age in the 1980's, a decade which was also fascinated with bringing comic books to life. In films such as Roger Rabbitt, live-action cinema was merged with the flat, caricatured aesthetic of the cartoon, laying an opaque hieroglyphics over the depth of the filmic image.

The modernist ideal of the sharp, crisp graphic symbol is giving way to a logic which favors the folding of signs into experience. This softening of the edges between signs and reality reflects the ongoing conquest of the real by the abstract, the will to impose a legible pattern or symbol over the amorphous mass of experience. The grafting of hieroglyphic signs onto the fullness of experience-to bring the sign to life and into life-is seen in numerous advertising campaigns. Absolut projects its product silhouette into various settings with its endlessly transformed bottle, while other ads merge the corporate hieroglyph with naturalistic settings and live-action drama. We either see living objects becoming signs, or we see corporate symbols acting as life-size elements in the landscape.

Architecture also increasingly participates in the phenomenon of the hieroglyph. Numerous office towers have come to function like graphic logos for a corporation, their silhouettes serving as massive commercial signs across the script of urban skylines, such as San Francisco's TransAmerica pyramid or New York's Citicorp building.

The expansion of global advertising strategies has been another agent in the internationalization of the public landscape. Initiated in the mid-80's by British firms such as Saatchi and Saatchi, global advertising relies on images and messages that function across diverse markets. An early example is a series of Coca-Cola ads called the Mean Joe Greene Series, which features American, Brazilian, Argentinean, and Thai sports stars, each giving a youngster a football jersey in gratitude for a Coke. Such "universal" narratives of heroism and identification are considered general and durable enough to cross cultural contexts. Global strategies increasingly preoccupy advertisers, who wish to centrally control their worldwide identity rather than entrust their marketing to local firms.

The success of this centralization depends upon the pairing of sufficiently general messages with equally generic imagery. The production of a single ad to run across different national markets has created a demand for a new "everyperson"-or "everyconsumer"-a full-bodied, full-color corollary to the international man of airport signage. It has created a need for what a marketing director at Coca-Cola described as a "global teenager": "There is global media now, like MTV. And there is a global teenager. The same kid you see at the Ginza in Tokyo is in Piccadilly Square in London, in Pushkin Square, at Notre Dame."11

Of course, Coca-Cola and MTV have a vested interest in the concept of a universal teenager and, furthermore, Tokyo, London, and Moscow hardly fulfill the definition of "globalness." Yet the projection of a globally consistent consumer-through advertising, marketing, and packaging-increasingly will inform the public representation of cultural identity.

For example, the international marketing of Frosted Flakes uses a young man whose racial, ethnic, and national identity are uncertain. His generic good looks allow him to function as a logotypical consumer in American, Latin American, and European contexts. Tony the Tiger presents another approach within global advertising: the cartoon mascot/spokesperson who escapes questions of cultural identity entirely. The cartoon/mascot is a speaking, acting logo-a proprietary beast of burden who is trademark and spokesperson rolled into one.

The economic and bureaucratic advantage of global campaigns is that advertisers can approach divergent audiences as a unified market, as in the United Colors of Benetton campaign. In contrast to Frosted Flakes, Benetton has constructed a global market not by blurring cultural difference but by incorporating cultural difference as its theme or trademark. While Frosted Flakes attempts to override racial and cultural specificity, the Benetton campaign makes a fashion statement about cultural difference.

The possibility of a "world culture" in the next millennium brings with it the same anxieties that attended the postwar uniformity of American culture. The loss of individuality and the sense of placelessness in American suburbia can be extrapolated to a worldwide context. Mass media, internationalized markets, and tourism suggest a future "world culture" of stunning sameness.

Internationalization, especially as expressed in the U.S. Department of Transportation symbols, has been viewed as a democratizing force that facilitates intercultural communication and contributes to an ecology of information through an economy of signs. What many instances of internationalization show, however, is a hegemonic relationship between the officially sanctioned "language of internationalism" and the specific cultural contexts which they inhabit. The sign for "women's toilet" in a Saudi Arabian university has been modified by the addition of the silhouette of a veil, since the long dress depicted could just as easily signify the traditional robes worn by Muslim men. The use of pictorial symbols is, in itself, problematic for Muslim religious codes, which discourage representations of the body.

Consider also the poorly conceived sign that has been used on San Diego freeways to alert drivers to Mexican immigrants who run across the freeway trying to avoid the customs checkpoints.The image of the family in that sign was interpreted by Spanish-speaking people as a directive to "cross here." Thus the very audience most in danger was misled by a sign directed at drivers, rather than pedestrians.

Modern hieroglyphs crystallize through simplification and repetition: by offering schematic icons for film genres, news events, or corporate messages, the hieroglyph visually categorizes experience into tidy packages, often reducing it to a flattened cliché. One of the chief functions of graphic design is to generate such tidy icons. But are designers only in the business of purveying dominant ideologies and pandering to the reduced attention spans of contemporary audiences? Could the code of repetitive symbols and schemes that provides the bulk of our visual diet be used for something more than passive instruction or the caricature of complex ideas into univocal statements? If graphic design provides an interface between people and products, could it not also provide an interface between people and culture? We call this utopian project for design in the next millennium "critical wayfinding," or the construction of interfaces which serve not to package corporate messages, but rather to provide alternate routes of access to media and information.

For example, one of the chief inventors of international pictograms was Otto Neurath, a Viennese philosopher and social scientist who pioneered the use of pictorial symbols in the 1920's and 1930's as a means of public, cross-cultural education. Although his pictograms are remembered now as the ubiquitous signage found in train stations, airports, and art museums, in his own lifetime he used them to display social statistics in a visually accessible way.

Designers working in the critical spirit of Otto Neurath today include Dennis Livingston, a Baltimore-based activist designer who uses pictorial symbols to track distribution of wealth across the categories of race, sex, profession, and family organization. His chart of Social Stratification allows readers to see vertical paths running upward through the economic heap, expressing the fact that for many people social identity is formed more by profession (e.g., office work vs. factory work) than by income.

A billboard-sized poster created by Michael Lebron, a New York-based artist and designer, uses the language of advertising and information design to compare the amount of money spent preventing terrorist attacks on international airplane travel to the amount of money spent preventing the death of poor children across the globe. A 1988 billboard designed by Sheila de Bretteville and the Brooklyn 7 entitled Can-U-Read-Me? uses a combination of pictures, letters, and symbols to encourage people to learn to read. By showing non-readers how much they already know just by living in a literate culture, this hieroglyphic billboard helps to demystify literacy and thus to make it more accessible.

In a more comic vein, the designers of Spy Magazine in the 1980's created a mode of information graphics which derails the intellectual paternalism of mainstream news media and explores instead the messy subconscious of the information age. The tongue-in-cheek yet meticulously archival style of Spy's news graphics, invented by Stephen Doyle and Alex Isley in the mid-80's, is an example of design that works within yet against the dominant codes of the media.

These examples, taken from both the context of activist design and the commercial media, indicate some paths that designers could pursue at the edge of the millennium. Graphic design, as the interface between people and products, information, and environments, has the potential to interpret, revise, and critique the world as well as to simplify and condense it. The notion that design should be transparent, and that we are simply legibility- and problem-solvers, offers a recessive and reactive role for design that is ultimately disempowering.

Notes
1. Kenneth Frampton questions the legitimacy of "communication" as an architectural value in his essay "Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance," in Hal Foster, ed., Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 16-30.
2. On the history and theory of international pictograms, see Ellen Lupton, "Reading Isotype," in Victor Margolin, ed., Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
3. On corporate identity, see Maud Lavin, "Design in the Service of Commerce," in Mildred Friedman, ed., Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History (Minneapolis and New York: Walker Art Center and Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 126-143.
4. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
5. I. J. Gelb, A Study of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1974), 30-44.
7. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983; Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
8. Jean Baudrillard, "Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction," in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), 88-101.
9. Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990).
10. J. Abbott Miller, "USA Today: Learning from Las Vegas," Print XLIV:VI (December 1991): 90-97.
11. Peter S. Sealey, Senior Vice President and Director of Global Marketing for Coca-Cola, quoted in The New York Times (November 18, 1991).

"Critical Wayfinding," essay by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, published in The Edge of the Millennium,. ed. Susan Yelavich. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1993. 220-232.

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Critical Wayfinding "Critical Wayfinding," essay by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, published in The Edge of the Millennium,. ed. Susan Yelavich. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1993. 220-232.

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The Politics of Design explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colours, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use every day. Designers, communication specialists, and image-makers possess the power to shape visual communication, and with that power comes great responsibility. Are we as creative professionals really aware of the political meaning and impact of our work in today's network society? This book examines cultural contexts and stereotypes with visual examples from around the world. It demonstrates that communication tools are never neutral, and encourages its users to rethink global cultural understanding. Additional works by contemporary artists and designers show that political awareness does not limit creativity, but opens up new explorations for a critical visual culture. More about the book here.

About The Author
Under the name Untold Stories, Ruben Pater creates visual narratives that support solidarity, justice, and equality. This often starts as a collaboration with other disciplines to create new perspectives on complex social and political issues. Visual stories that reach a wide audience through publications, installations, interactive media, or film. His Drone Survival Guide (2013), received worldwide attention as a dicussion piece on military drones. In his book The Politics of Design (BIS Publishers, 2016) he looks at the responsibilities of designers in visual culture. He teaches at the bachelor of graphic design and the master Non-Linear Narrative at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, the Netherlands. www.untold-stories.net

Check out a digital preview of the book here.

Contact the Author
Contact Publisher for Press Information
Follow the Instagram account

Programming by Kris Borgerink

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The Politics of Design explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colours, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use every day. Designers, communication specialists, and image-makers possess the power to shape visual communication, and with that power comes great responsibility.

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Excellent start Swany.

Next steps [suggested research]:

- consider the ‘interface’ of repetition, what form does it take? A *New* Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt has an excellent chapter on interfaces you may find useful.

- research repetition in a closed context (perhaps time?) to help you narrow your focus.

- research speculative design

Next steps [suggested experiments]:

- make a list of time management systems (e.g. timetables, clocks, calendars, etc.) and think how you could redesign them/disrupt them with repetition.

- Experiment with repetition, do a single task over and over again

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Central Saint Martins School of Art

Rooted in three courses (Typography, Gestalt, and Interface) originally developed for liberal arts students at Princeton University, the book provides a broad introduction from Benjamin Franklin to Bruno Munari, Moholy-Nagy to Muriel Cooper and the Macintosh computer. After a brief introduction, David Reinfurt will present eight years of class lectures randomly sampled and compressed into exactly one hour.

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Central Saint Martins School of Art Rooted in three courses (Typography, Gestalt, and Interface) originally developed for liberal arts students at Princeton University, the book provides a broad introduction from Benjamin Franklin to Bruno Munari, Moholy-Nagy to Muriel Cooper and the Macintosh computer.

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Economic beginnings/concepts explained in an accessible way for designers, without jargon

With examples from the practice of six design collectives that try to dismantle the relations between capitalism and design

A source of inspiration for everyone in the design field: students, designers, educators (just like Ruben Paters previous book, The Politics of Design (2016))

Selected as by the Student Jury as one of the Best Book Designs 2021!

Winner of Dutch Design Award 2022

Ruben Pater developed a CAPS LOCK educational toolkit, which can be downloaded for free here

Author: Ruben Pater
Design: Ruben Pater

August 2021, Valiz | Pb, 18,4 x 11,7 cm (h x w) | 552 pp. | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-81-7

Ruben Pater (1977, NL) was educated as a graphic designer, worked in several design studios, also independently, and as an educator (e.g. MA Royal Academy of Art, The Hague). With Untold Stories Pater makes critical work on the edge of graphic design, journalism and activism.

CAPS LOCK is an inspirational book full of sources for design students, educators and visual communicators all over the world, just like Rubens first book The Politics of Design (BIS, 2016). www.untold-stories.net; @unlisted_roots; @capitalslock
Press

Watch a clip from the interview with Ruben Pater about CAPS LOCK on RTV Slovenija (5 October 2022)

(Only in Slovenian) Read the interview with Ruben Pater about CAPS LOCK in Marketing Magazin (7 October 2022)

Read the review of CAPS LOCK in Eye Magazine (excerpt from no. 103/2022)

Read the interview with Ruben Pater on CAPS LOCK in étapes (March/April 2022)

Listen to the conversation with Ruben Pater about CAPS LOCK in The Deep Dive Podcast (March 3rd 2022)

Read the review in We Make Money not Art (February 25th 2022)

(Only in Italian) Read the review Una panoramica sullultimo libro di Ruben Pater by Valeria Pilas in Graphicus (November 2021)

Read The Daily Heller: Not Such Strange Bedfellows, an interview with Ruben Pater about CAPS LOCK by Steven Heller for Print Magazine (December 3rd 2021)

Click here to watch the online webinar by Ruben Pater about CAPS LOCK at AIGA, the Professional Association for Design (November 16th 2021)

Click here to watch the online lecture by Ruben Pater on CAPS LOCK, hosted by ELISAVA, Barcelona (November 27st 2021)

Click here to watch the online book talk with Ruben Pater on CAPS LOCK, hosted by Index, NYC (October 1st 2021)

Read In CAPS LOCK, Ruben Pater Untangles the Relationship Between Graphic Design and Capitalism, a review of CAPS LOCK, by Chris Westcott for AIGA, Eye on Design (published September 23rd 2021)

Read the review of CAPS LOCK in Design and Culture (November 15th 2022)

Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.

CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.

The content of CAPS LOCK is structured in chapters with titles of professions that designers can occupy (such as Educator; Engineer, Hacker, Futurist, Activist, etc.). These titles respond to the importance of not just how designers make work, but also how they perform daily economic and social roles.

Each chapter is divided into coherent articles in which diverse examples of objects and design practices are relayed. The book also features examples of radical design collectives, that work towards alternatives between design, community and reciprocity.

Also available as Ebook via this link

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Economic beginnings/concepts explained in an accessible way for designers, without jargon With examples from the practice of six design collectives that try to dismantle the relations between capitalism and design A source of inspiration for everyone in the design field: students, designers, educators (just like Ruben Paters previous book, The Politics of Design (2016)) Selected as by the Student Jury as one of the Best Book Designs 2021!

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Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

By Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.

Designers are usually seen as problem solvers. Their function is to make a product better or more beautiful, or to make a process more efficient. But what if, instead of solving problems, they posed them? That is the premise behind Speculative Everything, the first book to look in detail at the kinds of results such an approach might throw up.... Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, professors at London's Royal College of Art, have been the most articulate proponents of the idea of "critical design". Their concern is not to design products to be sent out into a slightly uncertain future but rather to imagine how that future might be entirely different. The result is a series of scenarios that help to illuminate moral, ethical, political and aesthetic problems.

In Speculative Everything Dunne and Raby continue to inspire and challenge us to consider design as a unique mode of sociocultural inquiry. Rather than resigning design to either problem solving or styling, what Dunne and Raby offer is a vibrant practice of using design to materialize and experiment with alternate worldviews and futures. Speculative Everything is an important contribution to the field of design and should be read widely.

Carl DiSalvo

author of Adversarial Design

Financial Times

Overview Author(s) Praise

Summary

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.
Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be-to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).

Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more-about everything-reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Hardcover

$36.95 T ISBN: 9780262019842 240 pp. | 7 in x 9 in 143 color illus.

Authors

Anthony Dunne

Anthony Dunne is Professor and Head of the Design Interactions Programme at the Royal College of Art. He is the author of Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (MIT Press).

Fiona Raby

Fiona Raby is Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and Reader in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art.

Reviews

Designers are usually seen as problem solvers. Their function is to make a product better or more beautiful, or to make a process more efficient. But what if, instead of solving problems, they posed them? That is the premise behind Speculative Everything, the first book to look in detail at the kinds of results such an approach might throw up.... Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, professors at London's Royal College of Art, have been the most articulate proponents of the idea of "critical design". Their concern is not to design products to be sent out into a slightly uncertain future but rather to imagine how that future might be entirely different. The result is a series of scenarios that help to illuminate moral, ethical, political and aesthetic problems.

Financial Times

Speculative Everything neatly and quietly dispels the myths, misunderstandings and simplifications surrounding speculative design. Of course, there will always be people who dismiss Dunne and Raby's work for being too arty, and, well, too speculative to be strictly design but if some of them ever read the book, i'm quite convinced that they will at least agree on the fact that its authors ask some valid questions and more importantly perhaps articulate them in an intelligent, compelling way.

We Make Money Not Art

In conclusion, something should be said about how refined and handsome this book is, as a designed artifact. Though it's a work for the academy and not for the coffee-table, it deliberately upholds a high standard. All the illustrations, and there are many, are in crisp resolution, while starkly obvious pains have been taken to see that due credit was given to every creative person involved in every image. It's the polar opposite of the carefree, slobbering virality of Youtube, Tumblr, and this weblog, and there's something heart-lifting in its living demonstration of what can be achieved today. Not tomorrow, and not in the imagination-but really, right here and now.

Bruce Sterling

Beyond the Beyond

Endorsements

In Speculative Everything Dunne and Raby continue to inspire and challenge us to consider design as a unique mode of sociocultural inquiry. Rather than resigning design to either problem solving or styling, what Dunne and Raby offer is a vibrant practice of using design to materialize and experiment with alternate worldviews and futures. Speculative Everything is an important contribution to the field of design and should be read widely.

Carl DiSalvo

author of Adversarial Design

In a period where existing systems are reaching their effective limits, Speculative Everything describes an expanded and refreshing role for design. Dunne and Raby show how speculative design can stimulate debate and reveal choices that exist beyond the constraints of existing business, social, and technological approaches.

Tim Brown

CEO, IDEO

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby have set out to change the landscape of contemporary design. They remind us that design is about asking questions, as well as answering them. Speculative Everything, their provocative manifesto, is an intriguing contribution to the search for a new direction for design.

Deyan Sudjic

Director, Design Museum, London

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How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas.

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Hi Abbie! I‘m Swany. I decided to focus on "time" to continue exploring "repetition/homogenization", I want to ask a question about whether I need to design my experiments and behaviors under the perspective of "time" when I do some "repetitive" actions and experiments?

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The second question: When I redesign a time system, what should be the standard? Am I going to design a "new time system" that is different from the current time system (like a new rule) or break the "time system" and feel "time" in a completely natural way? If I design another fixed "time system", will it become the next standard and repetition?

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In the beginning, my argument has always been that repetition and homogenization are negative, but I'm now wondering if this has two sides? Should I think critically about this? How should I think critically about this question?

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Experiment The repetition of random coding

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Experiment： the repetition of the pendulum

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Experiment： the repetition of the pendulum

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Experiment： the repetition of radio gymnastics

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Experiment： the repetition of radio gymnastics

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experiment the repetition of radio gymnastics

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Hello, Abbie!

I feel like I'm experimenting a lot now, and some of them are going in a little different direction. Now for the visual output part, I'm thinking about how I can focus and move in a specific direction, and I'm considering how to visualize the thoughts I have now about "time" and "repetition".

Sometimes I'm a little confused when I'm working on a project, I'm used to going in many directions, doing a lot of different attempts and experiments, but sometimes after I've done a lot of attempts, it is a little bit hard to integrate these ideas or focus on one of them.

At this stage of the project, how should I organize my existing ideas and move forward? I'm wondering that are there any methods or tips that can better help me go deeper?

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Some questions about preparing for the application.

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Some questions about preparing for the application.

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Hello, Abbie!

What you told me about the graphic courses in RCA and LCC in class really got me thinking deeply. I have been thinking about what I want to get in my further study these days, I think the reason why I want to study in the UK instead of continuing the MA course in China at the Central Academy of Fine Arts is that I want to communicate with people from different places under the perspective of different cultures and try different design methods with different viewpoints. I thought maybe after the MA course I should have a different view and idea of ​​the world. So maybe I would be better suited to a more conceptual school? But for applications, maybe I can apply to some different schools at the same time?

I have gone to the official websites of RCA and LCC to see the graduate design projects in recent years, and they are all amazing! But to be honest, I'm sorry that I don't know much about the graphic communication design in CSM. I know that Abbie you teach there, so could you please briefly introduce the features of this MA course to me?

I already know some of the characteristics of the graphic courses in RCA and LCC, but I still wonder if there are different criteria when professors look at the portfolio we submit for application? I mean, do these different schools have any preference for the students they want to admit? Which traits do they prefer to possess? Or what parts of the portfolio and reflected qualities do they value most? I'm really curious about these. I often worry about whether I fit into these traits, or if I can improve myself to get closer to them. So sometimes I'm confident in the application and sometimes a little nervous.

I know I have a lot of questions about this, so thank you very much for reading the really long questions, and looking forward to your answers. 🥰

（Plus, I'm not sure if I'm being polite in describing these issues in English, so please forgive me if I'm not being clear in some places.）

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Thank you Kate, this is an interesting project. I’d recommend you increase your workload over the next week. We would like to see design iterations and your image making skills put to use in this project.

Next steps [suggested research]:

- look into gamification in graphic design

- find other graphic design-based games / political games / games created by graphic designers and analyse what they are doing / how they are doing it / the similarities and differences in what you want to achieve with your game.

Next steps [suggested iterations]:

- iterate the board game; experiment with materials, typography, instructions, etc.

- user test your game on new people, each time you make an experiment

A bit more time/attention to detail needed on your presentation

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Hello Abbie!

After last week's experiments, I started to try to think about the final form of my output. In fact, from the beginning, I had pretty much decided that I wanted to use a card or a board game as the final form of output, but in this research process, I started to wonder about my design and its purpose was it as a game. Or rather, why do people play it? Do people really play the game subjectively? As I dug deeper, I became torn between two scenarios.

The first scenario: we play a game just because it's fun. Many of us like to play chess, for example, because we think it is a very interesting game.

The second situation: the people who play it are only there to help me on the project, they are part of my conceptual expression, for example, I invite them, they participate in my project and I then record interviews with them. But it's not that they want to play the game themselves. In this case, the game is just a way for me to express the 'Matthew effect' or the 'gap between rich and poor, not a real game that attracts people.

I'm torn between the two,  and now I prefer to just use the game as a way of expressing my thoughts on the Matthew Effect and the wealth gap not put attention on “playing the game” itself, but that would make me feel that the game's format loses its "playability” here. However, “playability” is so crucial to games.

Thanks for your reading.
Looking forward to your reply.😊

Kate

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Fantastic amount of work this week Swany. I am very impressed with your commitment.

Next steps [suggested research]:

- ‘time templates’ is an interesting idea, can you find any communities that do not use universal time?

- research anti-procrastination techniques, is there a critical link between time and productivity you want to make here? Is a 24 hour day natural for humans? Or is it the result of capitalism?

Next steps [suggested iterations]:

- Select one of your experiments to develop further with focus

- list the ‘variables’ within this experiment and begin to iterate / altering the variables (e.g. using your interests in the repetition of gymnastics / the body clock, alter the variables of a day and repeat these exercises.)

- Iterate what a ‘day’ is - how to record it, visualise it, time it, etc.

- Use of code to make a new ‘clock’ dictated by other input (i.e. not time) to guide you through a day

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The Man in the Clock, Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam

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Marclay developed the idea for The Clock while working on his 2005 piece Screen Play. With the support of the London-based White Cube gallery, he assembled a team to find footage, which he edited together over the course of three years. Marclay debuted The Clock at White Cube's London gallery in 2010.

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Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people.

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Works

About

MY NAME IS LANGUAGE SERIES
(2018-ongoing)

Book: My Name is Language

Series: Mijn Naam is Taal / My Name is Language / Mein Name ist Sprache

ENGLISHES MOOC
(2019-ongoing)

Englishes Mooc

SPECULATIVE LANGUAGE
(2016-2017)

PDGN

Some Name Some Noun Simply

OTHER WORKS
(2007-2013)

Any other Business

New Latin

The Power of Listening

English Forecast

Character Witness

To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest

ENGLISHES SERIES
(2014-2016)

Portrait of an Englishes Collector

Her Production

A Romance in Five Acts and Twenty-one Englishes

Wer Mae Hao

Every Minute a Language Dies

She Put Me in Complexity of Words

Apologies and Compliments

Esplorobjektoj

Darling Good Night

Englishes exhibitions

YOURS IN SOLIDARITY
(2011-2013)

Yours in Solidarity

Reading Anarchism

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Could it help to visualise the game play? 

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Could it help to visualise the game play? 

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Credit... Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times.

Researchers are trying to figure out the right hour of the day to do everything. Can their studies sync us up with better health?

Credit... Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times.

Listen to This Article

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"Time," when we give it any thought, tends to strike us as extrinsic, a feature of our landscape: We track our passage through it as if traversing an invisible geography, our progress charted by wristwatch, clock, calendar. Humans didn't invent time, of course, but you might reasonably argue that because we invented the units we use to keep track of it - hours, minutes, seconds - we have every right to tinker with them when we want to. This, at least, was the position the Senate took on March 15, when in a surprise, and surprisingly uncontested, vote it passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The new law would, if the House concurs and the president signs, make daylight saving time permanent, beginning on Nov. 5, 2023.

The change has long been a desire of the retail industry because it is convinced that shoppers spend more money when it stays light out later. But lawmakers also seem to have regarded the annual rolling back of the clock as a personal affront: the groggy mornings that result from turning 6 a.m. into 5 a.m., the morale killer for Boston and Billings alike when darkness abruptly descends shortly after 4 in the afternoon. When the yeas prevailed, there was bipartisan applause, as if a particularly hostile foreign adversary had been defeated.

What most of those lawmakers very likely didn't realize was that the enemy was not just outside us - a social agreement about how to label every moment of our existence relative to the sun - it was also inside us, where our internal organs are keeping time, too. In fact, most of our physiological functions are governed by an untold number of carefully synchronized biological clocks that each complete one cycle about every 24 hours. Those cycles are known as circadian rhythms, after the Latin for "about" ( circa) and "day" ( dies).

In the past two decades, however, researchers have discovered that the clock in the brain is by no means the only one in our body. It turns out that most of our cells contain a group of genes that might be thought of as gears in a mechanical watch, keeping time everywhere internally. These "clock genes" - there are at least six that are considered integral to the watch's operation - work together the same way in each cell. And just as they cause the release of hormones in the brain, they dictate other processes in other parts of the body. In the early 2000s, advances in the ability to detect the activity of genes in various tissues revealed that the cell clocks are organized into separate organ-level clocks representing every physiological system: There's a skin clock and a liver clock and an immune-system clock; there's a clock for the kidney, heart, lungs, muscles and reproductive system. Each of those clocks syncs itself to the central clock in the brain like an orchestra section following its conductor. But those sections also adjust how and when they perform based on guidance they receive both from the environment and from one another, and their timing can provide feedback to the central clock and cause it to adjust the time it keeps too. The liver, for instance, determines when to rev up your metabolism based on when you eat; if you do that in the middle of the night, the liver will be receiving contradictory cues from the brain, which is telling it to rest. As a result, when the liver starts processing the midnight food, it will do so less efficiently than it would have done after a daytime meal - and it sends conflicting signals back to the brain and other organ systems.

Such internal misalignment, or dysregulation, can throw our physiology out of whack. Perhaps the most familiar way we experience this sort of internal chaos is when traveling across multiple time zones: As we eat, sleep or engage in other activities based on the local time, our central and peripheral clocks reset themselves at different rates to match the new environment. The symptoms of jet lag - insomnia, exhaustion and stomach problems, sluggishness and distractedness - are examples of the sort of overall malaise caused by circadian confusion. Staying up hours later on the weekend than you do during the week has the same effect: This has been dubbed "social jet lag."

Circadian rhythms, in other words, are relevant to more than sleep. But few realized how relevant until 2014, when a professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania named John Hogenesch published a paper with his colleagues showing that almost half of the genes in mice produce proteins on a 24-hour schedule. This means that as the clock genes cycle through their functions, their work is activating or deactivating thousands of other, nonclock genes in consistent daily patterns. The finding astonished circadian experts. After giving a talk about the paper at a conference, Hogenesch went to the bathroom and encountered at the urinal Horacio de la Iglesia, a prominent biologist at the University of Washington with decades of circadian research to his name. De la Iglesia was incredulous about what he had just heard. Until then, it was thought that at most 30 percent of our genome was under circadian regulation. The mouse study implied that the number was far greater. "This was a mind-blowing idea," de la Iglesia says.

Hogenesch, an imposing figure, 6-foot-1 with an indifference to fashion mores and a naturally dubious expression, felt awkward but compelled to engage on the spot. He remembers explaining further that hundreds of the time-regulated genes he had identified in the mice were already being targeted in their human equivalents by existing drugs or were potential drug targets. The fact that the genes oscillated - became active or inactive in a predictable pattern - meant that those drugs might be very effective at certain times of the day and less so at others. And they might trigger side effects at certain times but not others, depending on the phase of the clocks in affected tissues. Hogenesch has since found that 50 percent of our genes are controlled by the clock. That amounts to about 10,000 of the roughly 20,000 genes we have.

Hogenesch has been explaining himself, and the relevance of clock genes to medicine, ever since. In 2018, he moved to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, where he was given a lab in the human-genetics division. (Before his appointment at Penn, he had a leadership role at the Genomics Institute at the pharmaceutical company Novartis, which jump-started the careers of numerous leaders in molecular biology.) Hogenesch hoped that being in daily proximity to patients and doctors would give him a chance to use circadian research to help people directly.

Western medicine has long been skeptical of studies that tout the health benefits of synchronizing treatments with biological cycles - as traditional Chinese medicine does - in large part because there was no scientific explanation for the results. The relatively recent revelation of the genetic underpinnings of circadian rhythms has sparked a re-evaluation of many decades-old ideas. Previously, those ideas were tested by seeing whether people who received a particular health intervention had different outcomes depending on when they received it, or by observing associations between the timing of certain behaviors, like sleep, and people's risk of disease.

Now scientists possess the technology to see how circadian rhythms oscillate at a molecular level based on behavior and time of day in both mice and people. Hogenesch is one of those scientists, and his effort to bridge the divide between the lab and the clinic has been its own kind of experiment in moving circadian biology from the fringes to the center of mainstream medical treatment. Ultimately, he and others hope, figuring out how the clocks in us work will enable us to control them in ways that improve our health - keeping us vigorous longer. At the moment, they tick relentlessly toward one end. Conceptually speaking, at least, if you could slow them down or pause them at will, you would be altering humanity's relationship with time itself.

Image

Credit... Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times

All creatures, humans included, tend to behave differently during the day than they do at night. The two periods reward opposing sensory strengths when it comes to hunting and hiding. For most of modern history, before we understood that the suprachiasmatic nucleus drives the sleep-wake cycle, it was assumed that we and other creatures simply took our cues from our surroundings - Is it light out? Dark? - when it comes to being active or resting.

But by 1971, Ronald Konopka, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, had begun testing a theory that certain behavior was, in fact, innate - driven by genes rather than external signals. To many, the notion sounded crazy; behavior was far too complex to be hereditary. Konopka, however, had observed that fruit-fly pupae usually emerged from their chrysalis-like shell at dawn, when the humidity enabled them to unfold their wings. How could the pupae, lacking a timer as they metamorphosed inside their cocoons, know when it was morning? Konopka and his professor Seymour Benzer - a molecular biologist at the forefront of the field that became known as behavioral genetics - began inducing random DNA mutations in fruit flies and watched for pupae that emerged at the wrong time of day. They produced three lineages that did: One emerged seemingly at random; one emerged too early; and one emerged too late. Remarkably, all three had mutations in the same gene. In ordinary flies, it seemed, that gene ran a 24-hour clock that was reset each day; the period of the clock in the mutants was too short, too long or nonexistent.

The suprachiasmatic nucleus is wired directly to the retina, and in the 1980s, it was confirmed that the brain clock could be calibrated by sunlight or artificial light, which signals when it's daytime. Getting light consistently when you first wake up, and waking up at the same time each day, can help keep the clock on track so that, in turn, you fall asleep at an optimal hour; it can also prevent a weakening of your circadian rhythms or a decrease in their amplitude. This results in less contrast between your active phase and your rest phase, which, in the case of sleep, can potentially translate into feeling more tired during the day and waking more often at night. Robust rhythms, however, require that the brain does not receive light signals at night. Some studies show that even while you're sleeping, dim light can penetrate your closed eyelids and confuse the clock.

Maintaining healthy circadian rhythms in the brain can improve the duration and quality of sleep, and better sleep correlates with better neural function and a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease, which has been associated with fragmented sleep. Adjusting the central clock, though, can also shift the sleep cycle to coincide with the optimal time for neurological repair during the brain's 24-hour cycle.

Scott Killgore, a professor at the University of Arizona, has explored light as a treatment for military veterans who have suffered traumatic brain injuries or have post-traumatic stress disorder. His findings suggest that exposure to blue light (a proxy for sunlight) in the morning could make therapy for PTSD more effective by improving his subjects' sleep. But when veterans get sleep - not just its quantity and quality - also seems to be important. Morning blue light (as opposed to a placebo of amber light) helped people recover from brain injuries and concussions largely by prompting them to fall asleep an hour earlier and awaken an hour earlier, which, Killgore says, appeared to equate to a "better time of night" for brain repair. After six weeks, subjects with traumatic brain injuries felt less sleepy, had better balance and did better on planning and sequencing tests; functional M.R.I.s showed that a brain region associated with visual attention had grown larger and had faster communication between neurons.

Being exposed to light when your body ought to be resting, on the other hand, can have a significant negative impact. In March, Phyllis Zee, a neurologist at Northwestern University, and her colleagues reported in PNAS that just one night of moderate light exposure during sleep - roughly what you would get by leaving the bedroom shades open to the streetlights - impaired glucose and cardiovascular regulation in otherwise healthy young study participants; over time, these changes could increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Last month, a publication in Sleep co-authored by Zee linked any nighttime light exposure during sleep to a substantial increased risk of obesity, diabetes and hypertension in older adults. The findings lend support to large epidemiological studies that have shown that light during sleep - particularly from a TV left on in the bedroom - is a risk factor for obesity. (Some 40 percent of Americans report leaving a TV or bedside lamp on at night.) A 2019 study in The Journal of Health Economics looked at people living in adjacent counties on either side of a time-zone border, a circumstance akin to comparing the impacts of daylight time versus standard. Those on the western side, for whom it was dark in the morning and light at night for an extra hour, slept less, were more likely to be overweight and obese and had higher risks of diabetes, heart attacks and cancer.

Widespread exposure to bright light at night has only been possible within the past 100 years. Until the invention of electricity and air travel, it would have been relatively tough to throw your brain clock out of alignment with the sun. Now, however, at least 20 percent of Americans work a shift that requires them to sleep during the day and be active at night for part of the week; this means they are likely to be exposed to daylight when they should be resting and often getting no comparable light when they're up and about. Such shift work - required of hospital and factory workers, restaurant staff, transportation providers, the military, first responders, new parents - has been associated with a wide range of health disorders. To figure out why, Kenneth Wright, who directs the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Colorado, has had healthy volunteers sleep during the day and stay awake all night. It doesn't take long for that schedule to significantly alter the sorts of proteins their bodies create in ways that are known to increase the risk of chronic disease. "Shift work goes against our fundamental biology," Wright says. "It's not going to go away. So what can we do? We have to come up with effective strategies to help them."

That, he and others believe, will most likely include advising them to eat, exercise and get the right sort of light at times that offset some of the health risks they face. For example, consider the timing of meals. Eating at night increases the risk of glucose intolerance, which causes diabetes, because the kidney, pancreas and liver are primed to be resting then. But a 2021 study in Science Advances demonstrated that when subjects were kept up at night, as shift workers are, but were awakened during the day to eat, they did not experience glucose intolerance. (It is possible for you to effectively become nocturnal by manipulating the time you get light, melatonin and other circadian cues - so that the active phase for your liver, brain and other organs occurs at night - but this is often impractical for shift workers who want or need to spend part of the week awake during the day.) Charles Czeisler, one of the study's authors and chief of the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, also directs the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School. He began his career as a sleep researcher in the early 1970s, before the importance of sleep to overall health was as widely appreciated as it is now. Currently, the application of circadian rhythms to health care - some speak of it as "circadian medicine," while others use "chronomedicine" - is often considered just a facet of sleep medicine, and it lacks the cohesion and influence that discipline has achieved. "Circadian medicine extends so far from sleep medicine," Czeisler told me. "We need to develop a new clinical specialty - in the same way sleep medicine was developed half a century ago."

Credit... Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times

Hospitals are, perhaps paradoxically, one of the worst environments imaginable for maintaining optimal circadian health. This goes for both staff and patients. Typically there is little natural light, and what there is is far dimmer indoors than out; patients' sleep is constantly interrupted by noises and procedures, many of which take place overnight and are thus performed by shift workers. When Hogenesch arrived at his Cincinnati hospital four years ago, he saw opportunities for improvement everywhere, starting with the lights. Cincinnati happened to be designing a new building, and he got involved in planning a lighting system for its neonatal intensive care unit that could mimic the full spectrum of daylight outside at any given hour. Right now, lights aren't considered "medical devices," meaning they are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration the way, say, pacemakers or bandages are. Instead, lighting schemes are largely based on habit and assumption rather than evidence of their effects on patient health. "The culture of neonatal intensive care is that darker is better," Jim Greenberg, the co-director of the hospital's perinatal unit, told me. "There's a misconception that the womb is a dark, quiet place. Part of standard practice is putting shrouds over isolettes to keep them in the dark."

Research has repeatedly shown, however, that premature infants who receive 12 hours of light followed by 12 hours of darkness are discharged an average of two weeks earlier than those who are exposed to near constant darkness or near constant light. The new system will allow the hospital to go a step further and investigate for the first time the optimal lighting conditions for premature infants. This fall, doctors plan to test the effect of both various spectra and light-dark cycles on the metabolism and growth of newborns with gastrointestinal disorders. It's easy to imagine similar experiments revolutionizing the best practices for illuminating nursing homes, schools and office buildings. Oftentimes, as is true in the NICU, there is a presumption that drawn curtains and darkness bring tranquillity to the elderly and those suffering from pain or illness - when in fact the absence of light most likely results in worse moods, sleep and health.

After his encounter with de la Iglesia, Hogenesch decided to go on a public-relations offensive. If circadian scientists were startled by one another's work, it was no wonder that clinicians in other disciplines weren't aware of their research and thus weren't using it to help patients. I heard him exhort a handful of circadian researchers at a lunch in early 2020. "It's time for us to get out of our labs," he told them, "and into our colleagues' offices."

He meant this literally, David Smith, a pediatric ear, nose and throat doctor at Cincinnati, says. "It's like a political candidate doing house to house - John has given I don't know how many talks." This has required a certain willingness to set aside his ego. Hogenesch is internationally known in his field. But, he says, the reaction of specialists at the hospital when he barged into their units wielding PowerPoint slides and an encyclopedic knowledge of circadian research relevant to their disciplines tended to be, "Who's this Häagen-Dazs guy?"

It was at one such talk that Hogenesch discovered a probable circadian-rhythm malfunction that wasn't caused by poor light or fragmented sleep. Several doctors from Cincinnati's bone-marrow transplantation and immune-deficiency division happened to be in attendance. In their unit, children with leukemia are given chemotherapy to kill abnormal cells and suppress the immune system before a transplant, so that they don't reject a donor's marrow. The procedure often results in life-threatening complications. Afterward, patients typically spend three to eight weeks recovering in the hospital.

During that time, the doctors told Hogenesch, the children often developed hypertension that was difficult to medicate. They also described an effort they had been making to improve sleep in the unit by limiting disruptive noise at night - unnecessary monitor alarms, janitorial services, the clank of doors against metal doorstops.

The room's poor lighting and lack of total darkness didn't surprise Hogenesch, but he was startled to learn that the patients were fed intravenously 24 hours per day, a protocol based partly on the delivery and expiration times of the nutritional formula. Hogenesch explained to his colleagues that people often develop hypertension and other problems if they eat during their circadian rest phase, which is usually at night. "We had never thought about that in a clinical sense," Dandoy told me.

It took a year for Hogenesch, Dandoy and others to get the transplant division to agree to run a trial in which some patients would be fed for only 12 hours during the day instead of constantly. The hypothesis was that these children would experience better metabolic and immune-system regulation than those who received the current standard of care. "It could be a huge game-changer," Dandoy told me. By the end of last year, a dozen patients had tried the 12-hour regimen with no ill effects, though it is too early to say how much patients may benefit from it relative to their peers in a control group. The unit's dietitian, Cindy Taggart, was initially skeptical that the logistics would work. (Sometimes 14 hours for feeding is the best she can do.) Anecdotally, she thinks it is helping. "I do feel like my patients return to eating faster," she says.

Metabolism isn't just about the digestion of food. It's also about how all our cells use energy to perform the tasks required to keep us alive and functioning. The more efficiently they can do that - while simultaneously replicating and repairing themselves - the better off we tend to be. Phyllis Zee, the neurologist who in 2014 founded the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, the first place in the United States to consider circadian medicine as a separate specialty, thinks patients with lots of common chronic diseases - from diabetes to heart disease to cognitive decline - might see improvement by changing their behaviors to improve the synchronization of their internal clocks. "You don't need to do the fancy stuff," she says. Keeping a log of when you sleep and wake, eat and take medications - as well as how the night goes and how you feel - could give you and your primary care doctor plenty of information to act on.

Indeed, one of the great promises of circadian medicine is its D.I.Y. appeal: If we could figure out the optimal time to eat or exercise, for example, we could change our behavior immediately - free of charge - not only to minimize the harm but also to maximize the health benefits of given activities. Professional athletes and their trainers, for instance, know that physical performance peaks in the late afternoon or early evening. (Most world records are broken in the evening.) In February, Cell Metabolism published an "atlas of exercise metabolism" that showed how, for mice, the metabolic effects of running on mini-treadmills changed over 24 hours. It may be, says Juleen Zierath, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and one of the study's authors, that certain types of activity - like low-intensity exercise versus high-intensity - are ideally undertaken at certain times depending on the outcome you prioritize (weight loss, blood-sugar control, strength). "These are small changes for small improvements," she says. "I would call it fine-tuning."

For elite athletes, though, the slightest advantage can make the difference between a loss and a victory. Charles Czeisler has served as a sleep consultant for professional sports teams, including the Boston Celtics and the Red Sox, since 2009. The Celtics schedule, he says by way of example, was "inadvertently inducing tremendous circadian disruption." Their games often ended at 11 p.m.; they finished up at the arena, ate dinner and arrived home as late as 4 a.m. Then many had to get treatment for injuries at 7 a.m. before practice at 9 a.m. Fixing the problem didn't require any special therapy or high-tech equipment. Czeisler just persuaded them to maintain consistent sleep-wake times throughout the week and weekend: practicing in the afternoon, going to bed at 3 a.m. and sleeping until 11 a.m. He insisted that they not schedule early-morning flights. When they traveled to the West Coast, he advised them to shift their schedule by three hours to keep their bodies on East Coast time. It's impossible to quantify the exact impact Czeisler's adjustments have had on performance, but a 2017 study in the journal PNAS analyzed 20 years of Major League Baseball statistics and was able to ascribe a dip in teams' winning percentage to the circadian disruptions that cause jet lag.

Nonathletes and circadian researchers have focused more interest on the question of when to eat or fast - whether to skip breakfast or dinner, for example. Some of the most convincing answers have come from randomized controlled trials by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Separate trials with participants who were overweight and who had diabetes showed that consuming most of your calories early - having a large breakfast, a medium lunch and a small dinner - leads to lower blood-sugar levels and greater weight loss compared with sizing the meals in reverse order.

Depriving cells of nutrients can initiate different metabolic processes. Studies involving mice have found that when the animals' caloric input is restricted to 30 percent below what they typically consume, they live 30 percent longer than usual. Looking at those experiments, Joseph Takahashi, the Texas Southwestern neuroscientist, who is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, wondered how much influence circadian rhythms, as opposed to caloric restriction and the fasting period, had on the mice's longevity. In a study published in Science last month, he and his colleagues managed to tease apart this correlation. When the restricted diet was meted out to mice around the clock, their life spans were only 10 percent longer than those of mice in a control group that ate as much as they wanted whenever they wanted. Mice on the restricted diet that got their food all at once ate all their calories within a two-hour window - and lived an additional 10 percent longer. Finally, when the mice ate during their active phase, rather than during their rest phase, they lived another 15 percent longer yet.

This suggests that the time of day when the mice ate was just as important to their longevity as any other factor. To try to figure out why, Takahashi and his team examined the liver tissue after the mice died. They discovered that the longer the mice lived, the more active were the genes regulating immune function and inflammation; the genes associated with metabolism were less active. "Aging you can think of as really a disease of inflammation," Takahashi told me. The implication is that by figuring out the relationship between our clock genes and the genes governing metabolism and inflammation - and modifying the workings of clock genes to speed up or slow down those processes throughout the body - we may be able to prevent disease and thereby remain healthy into old age.

Researchers have long known that the immune system, which generates inflammation in response to harmful stimuli like injury, toxins and germs, oscillates in a 24-hour rhythm. Since 1960, studies of mice have repeatedly demonstrated that the time of day they are injected with a bacterial toxin that prompts an immune reaction significantly affects their mortality: the infection kills about 80 percent of the mice that are exposed to the pathogen during their rest phase; it kills only 30 percent of those exposed in the middle of their active period.

When we are awake, immune cells are poised to respond to damage in our tissues; at night, they circulate in the bloodstream and collect information about any threats encountered that day. Wounds heal faster during the day. Flu vaccines are more effective if given in the morning. In 2015, Aziz Sancar, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that a skin protein that repairs damage from ultraviolet exposure is controlled by a clock gene and thus operates with circadian rhythmicity. Rodents exposed to UV radiation at 4 a.m., for example, are five times more likely to develop invasive skin cancer than those exposed at 4 p.m.

There is a growing interest in exploiting circadian rhythms - by aligning our behavior with our clocks or our clocks with our behavior - to improve the efficacy and reduce the side effects of treatments for diseases, especially cancer. Changing our behavior, of course, is much easier. Decades ago, studies led by Francis Lévi, a medical oncology specialist at Paris-Saclay University, conducted before the cellular clock mechanisms were well understood, found that the toxicity of cancer drugs - responsible for the harmful side effects that accompany chemotherapy - could be reduced and the drugs' effectiveness against cancer cells boosted if the drugs were infused at certain times of day. But follow-up studies showed that a particular infusion schedule improved the length of survival for men with colorectal cancer by nearly 40 percent, whereas the same schedule reduced survival for women by 25 percent. Lévi has since found that another colorectal drug was least toxic for men at 9 a.m., when it was most toxic for women; their least toxic window was 3 to 4 p.m.

Lévi is now conducting trials in France to figure out more precisely how sex and other factors influence patients' response to and tolerance for chemotherapy. He is also studying how the circadian timing of tumors may differ from those of their hosts, which could reveal when they are most vulnerable to destruction. Lévi believes this work can help patients soon. Sancar, who is also doing research on tumors, is more cautious. "There's been a great deal of wishful thinking unfortunately in our field," he says. "You have to be realistic with what you have. You cannot be optimistic."

Credit... Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times

A new drug usually takes at least a decade to develop. Hogenesch thinks that we could take advantage of our biological clocks to improve the efficacy and reduce the side effects of the drugs we already have. In August 2019, he and his colleagues published a paper in Science noting that the circadian half of our genome includes many targets of the roughly 2,000 prescription drugs available in the United States. Very few of those medicines have been tested clinically at multiple times of day. Only four of the top 50 most-prescribed drugs come with F.D.A.-approved recommendations for when they should be taken.

Hogenesch had hoped that pharmaceutical company executives would read the Science paper and be inspired to retest their existing drugs with timing as a variable. Besides improving those on the market, the companies might also find that experimental drugs that did not work well enough to obtain federal approval previously would do so if given at a different hour. Hogenesch says he has personally raised the paper's conclusions with executives from at least two major drug companies. Their response: " 'That's really interesting. Great paper,'" Hogenesch says. "And then they change nothing." That may be because it's easier to make drugs that remain active all day in the body than it is to get people to take a pill, or multiple pills, at specified times.

This is perhaps the single biggest obstacle in translating into practice the circadian research that could help us now: If we knew the optimal time to take medicine or get treatment, would we - could we - hit that window? "It's a big question," says Zachary Buchwald, a radiation oncologist at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University Medical Center. Already, according to one 2010 study, half of all prescription drugs are taken incorrectly.

Last year, Buchwald and his colleagues published a paper in Lancet Oncology showing that patients with metastatic melanoma who received at least 20 percent of their immunotherapy drug infusions after 4:30 p.m. did not live as long, on average, as those who received them earlier. But the study was purely observational. To be sure that it was the timing of the drug that affected survival - and not, for instance, because patients with other health disadvantages, like fewer financial resources, tend to schedule later appointments - Buchwald needs to be able to assign patients to random time slots, and he's not sure any of them will be willing to accept that. It's hard enough for them to come in at an hour of their choosing. And if timing does affect survival, what he dreams of is a drug he can administer shortly before an infusion that shifts the clock in the immune system and the affected tissues to the ideal time. Without that, determining each patient's clock phases to identify the best time for an infusion and then getting the patient to the clinic in that interval feels out of reach, he says. "An hour here or there - if that's what matters, we're kind of doomed to failure."

The conundrum Buchwald, Hogenesch and others face is that to determine how critical the timing of drug taking is, you need large data sets with hundreds - preferably thousands - of diverse patients taking a drug across 24 hours. Otherwise, you risk not seeing small effects, or believing that an anomalously large effect is representative. But before institutions with the resources to run those studies will undertake them, they want proof that doing so will be worth it. Takahashi points out that cancer research is the largest biomedical field in the United States, yet relatively few people are working on circadian rhythms and cancer. "For them to have any impact on the field of cancer in the U.S., which has more than 5,000 labs, it's like a drop in the bucket."

Unable to persuade pharmaceutical companies that retesting drugs is in their financial interest, Hogenesch has pressed his case at his hospital and others. Initial drug doses given in hospitals, his team has learned, are most likely to happen at specific times of day, usually corresponding to shift changes and when medical teams make their rounds. "Clinical decisions should be made around the clock," he and his co-authors wrote in a 2019 PNAS publication. "Pain, infection, hypertensive crisis and other conditions do not occur selectively in the morning." In person, he is blunter: "No matter how dumb it is," he says, referring to conventional hospital practices involving lighting, for example, or drug delivery, "they don't want to change it."

His observations have resonated with circadian scientists struggling to make headway at their own institutions. "John has managed to elevate the discussion or the awareness of the discussion that needed to happen," says Elizabeth Klerman, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who works in the sleep division at Massachusetts General Hospital. Frank Scheer, director of the Medical Chronobiology Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has also been impressed. "We're trying to improve the health of the most vulnerable, we have a responsibility to take care of them, and despite that, they're in environments not conducive to sleep," he says, of hospital patients. "I think his work is beautiful. He's making great headway in this area."

Though the PNAS data revealed that when hospitals deliver drugs very likely makes more operational than medical sense, it wasn't able to show whether that timing harms patients. If it doesn't, why change it? Hogenesch's team and collaborators at other hospitals are now analyzing electronic medical records to see if they can show that the times certain common drugs are given affect how well they work. This is harder than it sounds, because the data hospitals collect is primarily for billing, not research, and when patients receive services and medications isn't always noted. If logging the times of procedures - of blood draws, vaccines, urine and other samples - in patients' electronic medical records were standard practice, it could vastly improve our understanding, Zee notes. "Nowhere in your vaccination record does it say when you got it." But doing that ought to be "so easy," she adds. "This is all electronic."

Any data gleaned from medical records will still be observational, but the more such data you have from a variety of sources, the more persuasive it can be. In the meantime, researchers can create larger and more representative samples by looking at multiple small studies collectively in what's called a metanalysis. Last year, to help make the case that medication timing could have a major impact, Hogenesch and colleagues released as a preprint, ahead of peer review, a metanalysis of previous clinical trials that included the time of day that subjects received one of 48 pharmacological or surgical treatments. Unexpectedly, low-dose aspirin, which millions of people take daily to prevent cardiovascular disease and which doesn't come with guidance for when to take it, proved to be the most time-sensitive: Eight out of 10 studies found it to be more effective when given in the evening as opposed to in the morning.

Personalized circadian medicine may be the future. The timing of our clocks varies by individual, set by the sun, indoor lighting, genetic predisposition, our behavior, our age, one another. Scientists are still scrambling to develop a quick and easy method for telling what phase, or phases, your organs are in. But for now, absolute precision isn't required to improve the coordination and strength of your biological rhythms. Circadian researchers generally suggest getting as much sunlight as you can during your day, especially upon waking, dimming the lights before sleep and making your bedroom dark. (Parking America on standard time, not daylight, would help accomplish that.) Front-load your calories earlier in the day. Most of all, try to keep your schedule comparable across the week, including weekends. "There's room here to think about overall health optimization - improving mood, improving overall health," Helen Burgess, a professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan, told me. "We're all getting older. Many of us feel like we're languishing," she added. "What are the tiny little things I can do to feel better?"

Circadian medicine may enhance our well-​being, in other words, but most of us should not expect it to transform our lives anytime soon. There are, though, exceptions to that rule whose unusual circumstances may point toward broader applications later. As Hogenesch put it to me, "You learn from the edge cases."

Soon after he arrived at Cincinnati, a colleague in Boston forwarded him an email from the parents of Jack Groseclose, a teenager with Smith-Kingsmore syndrome, an exceedingly rare condition caused by a mutation in a single gene that brings about pain and seizures, developmental delays, autism and a disposition to self-harm. In their letter, Mike and Kristen Groseclose explained that Jack was taking a drug to turn off the gene. It had improved many of his symptoms, but his sleep had taken on a bizarre pattern. For more than a week, he wouldn't sleep longer than an hour or two and instead paced constantly. (A Fitbit his parents purchased to track his activity showered them with congratulations.) Then, for seven to 10 days, he would sleep for 14 hours. "After 10 days of little to no sleep, his body starts to break down," they wrote. "He becomes shaky and unsteady, breaks out with eczema." Jack's doctors were baffled. Hoping to generate an explanation, the Grosecloses had included in their email a bar graph of Jack's sleep cycle and a photo of him. "He was looking poorly," Mike told me. Kristen added, "We thought a visual aid might help."

By happenstance, Hogenesch had recently discovered that turning off the same gene in mice increased the period of their circadian rhythm, making a cycle more than 24 hours long, and dampened its amplitude, blurring the boundaries between their phases of activity and rest. He explained to Prada that the drug Jack was taking might be having a similar effect on him. Prada, who has since moved to Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, and his colleagues began incrementally changing Jack's dose until they found one that maintained the drug's benefits without dysregulating sleep. When I talked with the Grosecloses, Jack had slept through the night for 30 days in a row. He was 17, and it was the most sleep the three of them had ever gotten as a family.

That, Hogenesch says, is the kind of meaningful, real-world change he has been pushing for. Inspired, he founded and began directing a sleep-and-circadian-medicine center at the hospital to treat complex cases, which includes assessing patients' genetic profiles. The center opened in 2020 and has been booked solid ever since. In May, Hogenesch was elected president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms; he will take the helm in 2024. A lot of new researchers are joining the field, he told me, and he hopes to use his role to promote their work - to make it relevant not just to doctors and patients but to everyone. To you.

"I think," he says, "this is our time."

Prop Stylist: Sophia Pappas

Kim Tingley is a contributing writer for the magazine and has been the Studies Show columnist for the past three years. She was a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2016. Her article for the magazine about wave-piloting in the Marshall Islands is anthologized in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017." Pablo Delcan is a graphic designer and an art director from Spain. In 2014, he founded Delcan & Company, a design studio based in New York.

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The Quest by Circadian Medicine to Make the Most of Our Body Clocks

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Researchers are trying to figure out the right hour of the day to do everything. Can their studies sync us up with better health? Credit... Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .

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It’s great to see your development Pearl. You now need to decide, and perhaps define, what ‘communication’ means. Does it have to be accurate to be communication? Find multiple definitions of communication and apply this to your research.

Next steps [suggested research]:

- investigate the naming conventions of emojis (I think one is called curious moon)

- original emojis built with limited pixels – is language getting simplified/unified? Or more complex?

- I appreciate you looking into the ethics of emoji, research further into ‘default white’

- would it be worth looking into meme culture as a form of communication? Particularly the language used in these memes.

Next steps [suggested iterations]:

- investigation into the yellow smiley face – how it’s interpreted / used in different context. Can you create an index of this? Or an encyclopaedia of everything yellow smiley face? By collecting this information you will find the theme of your work.

- more experiments needed before you can settle on an idea. You’ve done a lot of research, you need to translate this into experiments.

- when you’re happy with your experiments, choose an idea to iterate with for next weeks session

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Hello Abbie!

This week I'm still trying out a few different experiments. I want to experiment with how people would write books if emojis become a language everyone needs to learn.

If possible, could you recommend some simple Textbooks people in the UK would use to learn the language? I want to try and see if I can make books using emoji symbols.

Thank you.☺️

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Chineasy method

Based on the idea of building blocks, Chineasy breaks down the most essential Chinese characters into their fundamental components, transforming each character into a colorful, intuitive illustration.

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Chineasy | Award-Winning Chinese Learning Methodology

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Based on the idea of building blocks, Chineasy breaks down the most essential Chinese characters into their fundamental components, transforming each character into a colorful, intuitive illustration.

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Biff, Chip, Kipper, and Floppy the dog have been helping children learn to read - and love to read - for more than 30 years. These much-loved characters from Oxford Reading Tree were created in 1986 by author Roderick Hunt and illustrator Alex Brychta. Since then, hundreds of stories have been published, read by 30 million children around the world.

Find books, free activities, and storyteller videos.

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Guide to Biff, Chip and Kipper | Oxford Owl

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Biff, Chip, Kipper, and Floppy the dog have been helping children learn to read - and love to read - for more than 30 years. These much-loved characters from Oxford Reading Tree were created in 1986 by author Roderick Hunt and illustrator Alex Brychta.

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A question about how to introduce my project.

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A question about how to introduce my project.

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Hello, Abbie!
I have always been wondering if I need to explain every detail when I tell others about my work, or do I just need to briefly summarize what I want to express?
Because sometimes I wonder if talking too much will make the project sound like a burden, and too little for fear that the concepts will be unclear... 🤔This question often confuses me.
For example, if I'm being interviewed by a professor, how should I present my project?

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Hello Abbie.

For the emoji society I envision, I was wondering if I could use emojis to create some messages. These messages could perhaps be some of the advertisements in life. Like the many advertising messages we see on the road, they could be shown in different scenarios. However, it is left to the viewer to figure out the message.

As Ellen Lupton writes, symbols cannot be completely unified. People will perceive the message differently and because everyone has a different understanding of emojis, let the viewer use their imagination about these messages. Is this approach possible?

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I heard that the three pathways in visual communication will be canceled when applying for RCA this year? If so, do we make any differences when we apply?

Another question that may be a little weird, I know that a professor needs to review a lot of portfolios during the application season, so if there will be some videos in my portfolio, I will attach the video links, will the professor has time to go to watch those videos? I'm a little curious about this.😂

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Back to the topic - Regarding my design outcome, I am thinking about whether I can make an experimental video. The timeline of this video is the time I redesigned according to the common regulation of the biological clock and radio gymnastics. Maybe according to this new time system, it can be divided into six parts, combining images of radio gymnastics with some graphic design and coding images, perhaps incorporating some repetitive time-related things I did earlier, such as the repetition of the pendulum and its ticking sound? I'm not quite sure if this idea is feasible, so wanted to ask for your advice and some references about this.

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Hello Abbie!

Are we going to present the design directly in the next session? Are we going to let people understand and not describe it?

Or will we continue in the same way as before, just without the description of the research part?

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Hi Abbie！

Actually, there is still a part of the rule I talked about in my last lesson that I didn't actually think of clearly, so I may need more time to optimize it.

But I think I will use an instruction book next week to help me explain my rules. But I'm still confused about my output. Apart from the game proper and the instruction manual, do I need a booklet to show my preliminary experiments and my analysis process? Because I would like to be able to show the process of my thinking.

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Hello Abbie!

I know there are many great colleges in the UK, but I was wondering if you know of a school in the Netherlands called Design Academy Eindhoven? I know about this school because I have a friend who applied and she recommended to me to try it.

As I don't know much about art schools in other countries, I was wondering if Eindhoven is also a great school? (I hope this isn't a stupid question. 🥲)

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Thank you for your presentation this week Pearl. Next week we will spend 5mins looking at your work without you speaking. We would then like you to present your first draft, research and process from this week as normal.

Feedback:

- Creating images out of language – can you describe the emojis, then use this to describe an image?

- Research visual descriptions for visually impaired people (as a process you learn a lot about your images)

- Translation of English language textbooks – is this about learning a language or using interpretation?

- World emoji awards / data of emoji use (can you plot this against history? A historical timeline just in emojis?)

- Create a research book/a catalogue of your experiments and places where the yellow smiley face is found.

- Your idea to assume a future of international communication via an An emoji society is very interesting. Think beyond advertisements (what else? Stories, paintings, everything, etc.)

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This montage is very famous. It's quick and dynamic. You should be considering the pace of clips you show (try get this clip under 1min and make the pace energetic to grip your audience)

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Special Technique - CU Montage - 'Requiem for a Dream'

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This is an artist example of split screen, you could show multiple clips at the same time in this way.

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INDEX EDITION 046 - DÓRA MAURER - Thinking in Proportions (Trailer)

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Be experimental!

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a self portrait in the 'long portrait' form. www.edhobson.com

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Thank you for your presentation this week Kate. Next week we will spend 5mins looking at your work without you speaking. We would then like you to present your first draft, research and process from this week as normal.

Feedback:

- In your presentation you jump between naming conventions which makes it difficult to follow. Can you illustrate the rules? Think of ways to communicate the rules (videos, instruction manual, photographs, etc.)

- Because your topic is complex, your rules need to be simple.

- You can get a 9 sided dice

- Design the complete packaging/branding for the game. – the cards are interesting, keep developing the visual signs for each level. What existing visual language is there to communicate these different class levels?

- You need to practice English Language / English comprehension. The more you do this the more confident you will be.

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Thank you for your presentation this week Swany. Next week we will spend 5mins looking at your work without you speaking. We would then like you to present your first draft, research and process from this week as normal.

Feedback:

- Excellent presentation, very professional – improvement, try not to read from the screen. Can you show visuals that illustrate the different time methods?

- Research Charles Jencks’ Adhocism

- An exploration of time based media – communicate what are you learning through these iterations

- Be careful of legibility issues (blue text over video) Include the background info as to why these exercises take place etc.

- Make a research book to support your video(s)? (Show serape’s publications)

- Experiment with different audio? No audio? What effect does this have?

- Back to coding? Body tracking? See Tigris Li experiments

- Consider a way to show us the variables as the videos are playing? (Old video cameras or dance games?)

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Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared as an inversion counterpart to George Orwell's (1949).

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 banned and challenged books of the decade since the association began the list in 1990.

The title Brave New World derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't.

-  William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203-206

Shakespeare's use of the phrase is intended ironically, as the speaker is failing to recognise the evil nature of the island's visitors because of her innocence. Indeed, the next speaker-Miranda's father Prospero-replies to her innocent observation with the statement "'Tis new to thee."

Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des mondes ( The Best of All Worlds), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and satirised in Candide, Ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759). The first Standard Chinese translation, done by novelist Lily Hsueh and Aaron Jen-wang Hsueh in 1974, is entitled "美麗新世界" ( Pinyin: Měilì Xīn Shìjiè, literally " Beautiful New World").

Huxley wrote Brave New World whilst living in Sanary-sur-Mer, France, in the four months from May to August 1931. By this time, Huxley had established himself as a writer and social satirist. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and magazines and had published a collection of his poetry ( The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four satirical novels, Crome Yellow (1921), (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first dystopian work.

A short passage in Crome Yellow foreshadows Brave New World, showing that Huxley had such a future in mind already in 1921. Mr. Scogan, one of the earlier book's characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world".

Huxley said that Brave New World was inspired by the utopian novels of H. G. Wells, including A Modern Utopia (1905), and as a parody of Men Like Gods (1923). Wells' hopeful vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novels, which became Brave New World. He wrote in a letter to Mrs. Arthur Goldsmith, an American acquaintance, that he had "been having a little fun pulling the leg of H. G. Wells" but then he "got caught up in the excitement of [his] own ideas". Unlike the most popular optimistic utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia", somewhat influenced by Wells's own The Sleeper Awakes (dealing with subjects like corporate tyranny and behavioural conditioning) and the works of D. H. Lawrence.

For his part Wells published, two years after Brave New World, his Utopian Shape of Things to Come. Seeking to rebut the argument of Huxley's Mustapha Mond-that moronic underclasses were a necessary "social gyroscope" and that a society composed solely of intelligent, assertive "Alphas" would inevitably disintegrate in internecine struggle-Wells depicted a stable egalitarian society emerging after several generations of a reforming elite having complete control of education throughout the world. In the future depicted in Wells' book, posterity remembers Huxley as "a reactionary writer". The scientific futurism in Brave New World is believed to be appropriated from by J. B. S. Haldane.

The events of the Great Depression in Britain in 1931, with its mass unemployment and the abandonment of the gold standard, persuaded Huxley to assert that stability was the "primal and ultimate need" if civilisation was to survive the present crisis. The Brave New World character Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, is named after Sir Alfred Mond. Shortly before writing the novel, Huxley visited the Billingham Manufacturing Plant, Mond's technologically advanced factory near Billingham, north-east England, and it made a great impression on him.

Huxley used the setting and characters in his science fiction novel to express widely felt anxieties, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Huxley was outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity and the inward-looking nature of many Americans; he had also found the book My Life and Work by Henry Ford on the boat to America and he saw the book's principles applied in everything he encountered after leaving San Francisco.

The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF (After Ford) 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian calendar), where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called "soma". Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society.

Bernard takes a holiday with Lenina outside the World State to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, in which the two observe natural-born people, disease, the ageing process, other languages, and religious lifestyles for the first time. The culture of the village folk resembles the contemporary Native American groups of the region, descendants of the Anasazi, including the Puebloan peoples of Hopi and Zuni. Bernard and Lenina witness a violent public ritual and then encounter Linda, a woman originally from the World State who is living on the reservation with her son John, now a young man. She, too, visited the reservation on a holiday many years ago, but became separated from her group and was left behind. She had meanwhile become pregnant by a fellow holidaymaker (who is revealed to be Bernard's boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning). She did not try to return to the World State, because of her shame at her pregnancy. Despite spending his whole life in the reservation, John has never been accepted by the villagers, and his and Linda's lives have been hard and unpleasant. Linda has taught John to read, although from the only book in her possession-a scientific manual-and another book John found: the complete works of Shakespeare. Ostracised by the villagers, John is able to articulate his feelings only in terms of Shakespearean drama, quoting often from The Tempest, , , Romeo and Juliet and . Linda now wants to return to London, and John, too, wants to see this "brave new world" that his mother so often praised. Bernard sees an opportunity to thwart plans to exile him, and gets permission to take Linda and John back. On their return to London, John meets the Director and calls him his "father", a vulgarity which causes a roar of laughter. The humiliated Director resigns in shame before he can follow through with exiling Bernard.

Bernard, as "custodian" of the "savage" John who is now treated as a celebrity, is fawned on by the highest members of society and revels in attention he once scorned. Bernard's popularity is fleeting, though, and he becomes envious that John only really bonds with the literary-minded Helmholtz. Considered hideous and friendless, Linda spends all her time using soma, which she craved for so long, while John refuses to attend social events organised by Bernard, appalled by what he perceives to be an empty society. Lenina and John are physically attracted to each other, but John's view of courtship and romance, based on Shakespeare's writings, is utterly incompatible with Lenina's freewheeling attitude to sex. She tries to seduce him, but he attacks her, before suddenly being informed that his mother is on her deathbed. He rushes to Linda's bedside, causing a scandal, as this is not the "correct" attitude to death. Some children who enter the ward for "death-conditioning" come across as disrespectful to John, and he attacks one physically. He then tries to break up a distribution of soma to a lower-caste group, telling them that he is freeing them. Helmholtz and Bernard rush in to stop the ensuing riot, which the police quell by spraying soma vapor into the crowd.

Bernard, Helmholtz, and John are all brought before Mustapha Mond, the "Resident World Controller for Western Europe", who tells Bernard and Helmholtz that they are to be exiled to islands for antisocial activity. Bernard pleads for a second chance, but Helmholtz welcomes the opportunity to be a true individual, and chooses the Falkland Islands as his destination, believing that their bad weather will inspire his writing. Mond tells Helmholtz that exile is actually a reward. The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit into the social model of the World State. Mond outlines for John the events that led to the present society and his arguments for a caste system and social control. John rejects Mond's arguments, and Mond sums up John's views by claiming that John demands "the right to be unhappy". John asks if he may go to the islands as well, but Mond refuses, saying he wishes to see what happens to John next.

Jaded with his new life, John moves to an abandoned hilltop lighthouse, near the village of Puttenham, where he intends to adopt a solitary ascetic lifestyle in order to purify himself of civilization, practising self-flagellation. This draws reporters and eventually hundreds of amazed sightseers, hoping to witness his bizarre behaviour.

For a while it seems that John might be left alone, after the public's attention is drawn to other diversions, but a documentary maker has secretly filmed John's self-flagellation from a distance, and when released the documentary causes an international sensation. Helicopters arrive with more journalists. Crowds of people descend on John's retreat, demanding that he perform his whipping ritual for them. From one helicopter a young woman emerges who is implied to be Lenina. John, at the sight of a woman he both adores and loathes, whips at her in a fury and then turns the whip on himself, exciting the crowd, whose wild behaviour transforms into a soma-fuelled orgy. The next morning John awakes on the ground and is consumed by remorse over his participation in the night's events.

That evening, a swarm of helicopters appears on the horizon, the story of last night's orgy having been in all the papers. The first onlookers and reporters to arrive find that John is dead, having hanged himself.

Bernard Marx, a sleep-learning specialist at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Although Bernard is an Alpha-Plus (the upper class of the society), he is a misfit. He is unusually short for an Alpha; an alleged accident with alcohol in Bernard's blood-surrogate before his decanting has left him slightly stunted. Unlike his fellow utopians, Bernard is often angry, resentful, and jealous. At times, he is also cowardly and hypocritical. His conditioning is clearly incomplete. He does not enjoy communal sports, solidarity services, or promiscuous sex. He does not particularly enjoy soma. Bernard is in love with Lenina and does not like her sleeping with other men, even though "everyone belongs to everyone else". Bernard's triumphant return to utopian civilisation with John the Savage from the Reservation precipitates the downfall of the Director, who had been planning to exile him. Bernard's triumph is short-lived; he is ultimately banished to an island for his non-conformist behaviour.

John, the illicit son of the Director and Linda, born and reared on the Savage Reservation ("Malpais") after Linda was unwittingly left behind by her errant lover. John ("the Savage" or "Mr. Savage", as he is often called) is an outsider both on the Reservation-where the natives still practice marriage, natural birth, family life and religion-and the ostensibly civilised World State, based on principles of stability and happiness. He has read nothing but the complete works of William Shakespeare, which he quotes extensively, and, for the most part, aptly, though his allusion to the "Brave New World" (Miranda's words in The Tempest) takes on a darker and bitterly ironic resonance as the novel unfolds. John is intensely moral according to a code that he has been taught by Shakespeare and life in Malpais but is also naïve: his views are as imported into his own consciousness as are the hypnopedic messages of World State citizens. The admonishments of the men of Malpais taught him to regard his mother as a whore; but he cannot grasp that these were the same men who continually sought her out despite their supposedly sacred pledges of monogamy. Because he is unwanted in Malpais, he accepts the invitation to travel back to London and is initially astonished by the comforts of the World State. He remains committed to values that exist only in his poetry. He first spurns Lenina for failing to live up to his Shakespearean ideal and then the entire utopian society: he asserts that its technological wonders and consumerism are poor substitutes for individual freedom, human dignity and personal integrity. After his mother's death, he becomes deeply distressed with grief, surprising onlookers in the hospital. He then withdraws himself from society and attempts to purify himself of "sin" (desire), but is unable to do so. He finds himself gathering a lot of trouble for both his body and mind. He soon does not realise what is real or what is fake, what he does and what he does not do. Soon, everything he thinks about or feels just becomes blurred and unrecognizable. Finally he hangs himself in despair.

Helmholtz Watson, a handsome and successful Alpha-Plus lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering and a friend of Bernard. He feels unfulfilled writing endless propaganda doggerel, and the stifling conformism and philistinism of the World State make him restive. Helmholtz is ultimately exiled to the Falkland Islands-a cold asylum for disaffected Alpha-Plus non-conformists-after reading a heretical poem to his students on the virtues of solitude and helping John destroy some Deltas' rations of soma following Linda's death. Unlike Bernard, he takes his exile in his stride and comes to view it as an opportunity for inspiration in his writing. His first name derives from the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz.

Lenina Crowne, a young, beautiful foetus technician at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Lenina Crowne is a Beta who enjoys being a Beta. She is a vaccination worker with beliefs and values that are in line with a citizen of the World State. She is part of the 30% of the female population that are not freemartins (sterile women). Lenina is promiscuous and popular but somewhat quirky in her society: she had a four-month relation with Henry Foster, choosing not to have sex with anyone but him for a period of time. She is basically happy and well-conditioned, using soma to suppress unwelcome emotions, as is expected. Lenina has a date with Bernard, to whom she feels ambivalently attracted, and she goes to the Reservation with him. On returning to civilisation, she tries and fails to seduce John the Savage. John loves and desires Lenina but he is repelled by her forwardness and the prospect of pre-marital sex, rejecting her as an " impudent strumpet". Lenina visits John at the lighthouse but he attacks her with a whip, unwittingly inciting onlookers to do the same. Her exact fate is left unspecified.

Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, "His Fordship" Mustapha Mond presides over one of the ten zones of the World State, the global government set up after the cataclysmic Nine Years' War and great Economic Collapse. Sophisticated and good-natured, Mond is an urbane and hyperintelligent advocate of the World State and its ethos of "Community, Identity, Stability". Among the novel's characters, he is uniquely aware of the precise nature of the society he oversees and what it has given up to accomplish its gains. Mond argues that art, literature, and scientific freedom must be sacrificed to secure the ultimate utilitarian goal of maximising societal happiness. He defends the caste system, behavioural conditioning, and the lack of personal freedom in the World State: these, he says, are a price worth paying for achieving social stability, the highest social virtue because it leads to lasting happiness.

Fanny Crowne, Lenina Crowne's friend (they have the same last name because only ten thousand last names are in use in a World State comprising two billion people). Fanny voices the conventional values of her caste and society, particularly the importance of promiscuity: she advises Lenina that she should have more than one man in her life because it is unseemly to concentrate on just one. Fanny then warns Lenina away from a new lover whom she considers undeserving, yet she is ultimately supportive of the young woman's attraction to the savage John.

Henry Foster, one of Lenina's many lovers, is a perfectly conventional Alpha male, casually discussing Lenina's body with his coworkers. His success with Lenina, and his casual attitude about it, infuriate the jealous Bernard. Henry ultimately proves himself every bit the ideal World State citizen, finding no courage to defend Lenina from John's assaults despite having maintained an uncommonly longstanding sexual relationship with her.

Benito Hoover, another of Lenina's lovers. She remembers that he is particularly hairy when he takes his clothes off.

The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (DHC), also known as Thomas "Tomakin", is the administrator of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where he is a threatening figure who intends to exile Bernard to Iceland. His plans take an unexpected turn when Bernard returns from the Reservation with Linda (see below) and John, a child they both realise is actually his. This fact, scandalous and obscene in the World State, not because it was extramarital (which all sexual acts are), but because it was procreative, leads the Director to resign his post in shame.

, John's mother, decanted as a Beta-Minus in the World State, originally worked in the DHC's Fertilizing Room, and subsequently lost during a storm while visiting the New Mexico Savage Reservation with the Director many years before the events of the novel. Despite following her usual precautions, Linda became pregnant with the Director's son during their time together and was therefore unable to return to the World State by the time that she found her way to Malpais. Having been conditioned to the promiscuous social norms of the World State, Linda finds herself at once popular with every man in the pueblo (because she is open to all sexual advances) and also reviled for the same reason, seen as a whore by the wives of the men who visit her and by the men themselves (who come to her nonetheless). Her only comforts there are mescal brought by Popé as well as . Linda is desperate to return to the World State and to soma, wanting nothing more from her remaining life than comfort until death.

The Arch-Community-Songster, the secular equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the World State society. He takes personal offense when John refuses to attend Bernard's party.

The Director of Crematoria and Phosphorus Reclamation, one of the many disappointed, important figures to attend Bernard's party.

The Warden, an Alpha-Minus, the talkative chief administrator for the New Mexico Savage Reservation. He is blond, short, broad-shouldered, and has a booming voice.

Darwin Bonaparte, a "big game photographer" (i.e. filmmaker) who films John flogging himself. Darwin Bonaparte became known for two works: "feely of the gorillas' wedding", and "Sperm Whale's Love-life". He had already made a name for himself but still seeks more. He renews his fame by filming the savage, John, in his newest release "The Savage of Surrey". His name alludes to Charles Darwin and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Dr. Shaw, Bernard Marx's physician who consequently becomes the physician of both Linda and John. He prescribes a lethal dose of soma to Linda, which will stop her respiratory system from functioning in a span of one to two months, at her own behest but not without protest from John. Ultimately, they all agree that it is for the best, since denying her this request would cause more trouble for Society and Linda herself.

Dr. Gaffney, Provost of Eton, an Upper School for high-caste individuals. He shows Bernard and John around the classrooms, and the Hypnopaedic Control Room (used for behavioural conditioning through sleep learning). John asks if the students read Shakespeare but the Provost says the library contains only reference books because solitary activities, such as reading, are discouraged.

Miss Keate, Head Mistress of Eton Upper School. Bernard fancies her, and arranges an assignation with her.

Freemartins, women who have been deliberately made sterile by exposure to male hormones during foetal development but are still physically normal except for "the slightest tendency to grow beards." In the book, government policy requires freemartins to form 70% of the female population.

Popé, a native of Malpais. Although he reinforces the behaviour that causes hatred for Linda in Malpais by sleeping with her and bringing her , he still holds the traditional beliefs of his tribe. In his early years John attempted to kill him, but Popé brushed off his attempt and sent him fleeing. He gave Linda a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. (Historically, Popé or Po'pay was a Tewa religious leader who led the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 against Spanish colonial rule.)

Mitsima, an elder tribal shaman who also teaches John survival skills such as rudimentary ceramics (specifically coil pots, which were traditional to Native American tribes) and bow-making.

Kiakimé, a native girl whom John fell for, but is instead eventually wed to another boy from Malpais.

Kothlu, a native boy with whom Kiakimé is wed.

These are non-fictional and factual characters who lived before the events in this book, but are of note in the novel:

Henry Ford, who has become a messianic figure to the World State. "Our Ford" is used in place of "Our Lord", as a credit to popularising the use of the assembly line.

Sigmund Freud, "Our Freud" is sometimes said in place of "Our Ford" because Freud's psychoanalytic method depends implicitly upon the rules of classical conditioning,[citation needed ] and because Freud popularised the idea that sexual activity is essential to human happiness. (It is also strongly implied that citizens of the World State believe Freud and Ford to be the same person.)

H. G. Wells, "Dr. Wells", British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was a motivation for Brave New World. "All's well that ends Wells", wrote Huxley in his letters, criticising Wells for anthropological assumptions Huxley found unrealistic.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose conditioning techniques are used to train infants.

William Shakespeare, whose banned works are quoted throughout the novel by John, "the Savage". The plays quoted include , The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, , , Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and . Mustapha Mond also knows them because as a World Controller he has access to a selection of books from throughout history, including the Bible.

Thomas Robert Malthus, 19th century British economist, believed the people of the Earth would eventually be threatened by their inability to raise enough food to feed the population. In the novel, the eponymous character devises the contraceptive techniques (Malthusian belt) that are practiced by women of the World State.

Reuben Rabinovitch, the Polish-Jew character on whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first observed.

John Henry Newman, 19th century Catholic theologian and educator, believed university education the critical element in advancing post-industrial Western civilization. Mustapha Mond and The Savage discuss a passage from one of Newman's books.

Alfred Mond, British industrialist, financier and politician. He is the namesake of Mustapha Mond.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of Republic of Turkey. Naming Mond after Atatürk links up with their characteristics; he reigned during the time Brave New World was written and revolutionised the 'old' Ottoman state into a new nation.

The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be traced to political and cultural figures who contributed to the bureaucratic, economic, and technological systems of Huxley's age, and presumably those systems in Brave New World.

Soma: Huxley took the name for the drug used by the state to control the population after the Vedic ritual drink Soma, inspired by his interest in Indian mysticism.

Malthusian belt: A contraceptive device worn by women. When Huxley was writing Brave New World, organizations such as the Malthusian League had spread throughout Europe, advocating contraception. Although the controversial economic theory of Malthusianism was derived from an essay by Thomas Malthus about the economic effects of population growth, Malthus himself was an advocate of abstinence rather than contraception.

Upon its publication, Rebecca West praised Brave New World as "The most accomplished novel Huxley has yet written", Joseph Needham lauded it as "Mr. Huxley's remarkable book", and Bertrand Russell also praised it, stating, "Mr. Aldous Huxley has shown his usual masterly skill in Brave New World." Brave New World also received negative responses from other contemporary critics, although his work was later embraced.

In an article in the 4 May 1935 issue of the Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton explained that Huxley was revolting against the "Age of Utopias". Much of the discourse on man's future before 1914 was based on the thesis that humanity would solve all economic and social issues. In the decade following the war the discourse shifted to an examination of the causes of the catastrophe. The works of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw on the promises of socialism and a World State were then viewed as the ideas of naive optimists. Chesterton wrote:

After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolution against Utopia than against Victoria.

Similarly, in 1944 economist Ludwig von Mises described Brave New World as a satire of utopian predictions of socialism: "Aldous Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism's dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony."

The World State is built upon the principles of Henry Ford's assembly line: mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. While the World State lacks any supernatural-based religions, Ford himself is revered as the creator of their society but not as a deity, and characters celebrate Ford Day and swear oaths by his name (e.g., "By Ford!"). In this sense, some fragments of traditional religion are present, such as Christian crosses, which had their tops cut off to be changed to a "T", representing the Ford Model T. In England, there is an Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, obviously continuing the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in America The Christian Science Monitor continues publication as The Fordian Science Monitor. The World State calendar numbers years in the "AF" era-"Anno Ford"-with the calendar beginning in AD 1908, the year in which Ford's first Model T rolled off his assembly line. The novel's Gregorian calendar year is AD 2540, but it is referred to in the book as AF 632.

From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called "hypnopædia" in the book) to believe their own class is superior, but that the other classes perform needed functions. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and hallucinogenic drug called soma.

The biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering; Huxley wrote the book before the structure of DNA was known. However, Gregor Mendel's work with inheritance patterns in peas had been rediscovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on artificial selection, was well established. Huxley's family included a number of prominent biologists including Thomas Huxley, half-brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and his brother Julian Huxley who was a biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. Nonetheless, Huxley emphasises conditioning over breeding ( nurture versus nature); human embryos and fetuses are conditioned through a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins), thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one's future career would dictate), and other environmental stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.

Comparisons with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

In a letter to George Orwell about Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley wrote "Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World." He went on to write "Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The writer Christopher Hitchens, who published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why Americans Are Not Taught History",

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break because it could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.

Brave New World Revisited

In 1946, Huxley wrote in the foreword of the new edition of Brave New World:

If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle-the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"

First UK edition

Brave New World Revisited ( Harper & Brothers, US, 1958; Chatto & Windus, UK, 1959), written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World, is a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved toward or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future. In Brave New World Revisited, he concluded that the world was becoming like Brave New World much faster than he originally thought.

Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation, as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion. Brave New World Revisited is different in tone because of Huxley's evolving thought, as well as his conversion to Hindu Vedanta in the interim between the two books.

The last chapter of the book aims to propose action which could be taken to prevent a democracy from turning into the totalitarian world described in Brave New World. In Huxley's last novel, , he again expounds similar ideas to describe a utopian nation, which is generally viewed as a counterpart to Brave New World.

According to American Library Association, Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged in the United States due to insensitivity, offensive language, nudity, racism, conflict with a religious viewpoint, and being sexually explicit. It landed on the list of the top ten most challenged books in 2010 (3) and 2011 (7). The book also secured a spot on the association's list of the top one hundred challenged books for 1990-1999 (54), 2000-2009 (36), and 2010-2019 (26).

The following include specific instances of when the book has been censored, banned, or challenged:

In 1932, the book was banned in Ireland for its language, and for supposedly being anti-family and anti-religion.

In 1965, a Maryland English teacher alleged that he was fired for assigning Brave New World to students. The teacher sued for violation of First Amendment rights but lost both his case and the appeal, with the appeals court ruling that the assignment of the book was not the reason for his firing.

The book was banned in India in 1967, with Huxley accused of being a "pornographer".

In 1980, it was removed from classrooms in Miller, Missouri among other challenges.

The version of Brave New World Revisited published in China lacks explicit mentions of China itself.

The English writer Rose Macaulay published What Not: A Prophetic Comedy in 1918. What Not depicts a dystopian future where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state. Macaulay and Huxley shared the same literary circles and he attended her weekly literary salons.

Bertrand Russell felt Brave New World borrowed from his 1931 book "The Scientific Outlook", and wrote in a letter to his publisher that Huxley's novel was "merely an expansion of the two penultimate chapters of 'The Scientific Outlook.'"

H. G. Wells' novel The First Men in the Moon (1901) used concepts that Huxley added to his story. Both novels introduce a society consisting of a specialized caste system, new generations are produced in jars and bottles where their designated caste is decided before birth by tempering with the fetus' development, and individuals are drugged down when they are not needed.

George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the 1921 novel by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We. According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We".

In 1982, Polish author Antoni Smuszkiewicz, in his analysis of Polish science-fiction Zaczarowana gra ("The Magic Game"), presented accusations of plagiarism against Huxley. Smuszkiewicz showed similarities between Brave New World and two science fiction novels written earlier by Polish author Mieczysław Smolarski, namely Miasto światłości ("The City of Light", 1924) and Podróż poślubna pana Hamiltona ("Mr Hamilton's Honeymoon Trip", 1928). Smuszkiewicz wrote in his open letter to Huxley: "This work of a great author, both in the general depiction of the world as well as countless details, is so similar to two of my novels that in my opinion there is no possibility of accidental analogy."

Kate Lohnes, writing for Encyclopædia Britannica, notes similarities between Brave New World and other novels of the era could be seen as expressing "common fears surrounding the rapid advancement of technology and of the shared feelings of many tech-skeptics during the early 20th century". Other dystopian novels followed Huxley's work, including C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (1945) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 87 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

On 5 November 2019, BBC News listed Brave New World on its list of the 100 most influential novels. In 2021, Brave New World was one of six classic science fiction novels by British authors selected by Royal Mail to feature on a series of UK postage stamps.

Brave New World (opened 4 September 2015) in co-production by Royal & Derngate, Northampton and Touring Consortium Theatre Company which toured the UK. The adaptation was by Dawn King, composed by These New Puritans and directed by James Dacre.

Brave New World (radio broadcast) CBS Radio Workshop (27 January and 3 February 1956): music composed and conducted by Bernard Herrmann. Adapted for radio by William Froug. Introduced by William Conrad and narrated by Aldous Huxley. Featuring the voices of Joseph Kearns, Bill Idelson, Gloria Henry, Charlotte Lawrence, Byron Kane, Sam Edwards, Jack Kruschen, Vic Perrin, Lurene Tuttle, Herb Butterfield, Doris Singleton.

Brave New World (radio broadcast) (May 2013)

Brave New World (radio broadcast) BBC Radio 4 (22, 29 May 2016)

Huxley, Aldous (1998). Brave New World (First Perennial Classics ed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-092987-1.

Huxley, Aldous (2000). Brave New World Revisited (First Perennial Classics ed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-095551-1.

Huxley, Aldous (2005). Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited (First Perennial Classics ed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-077609-9.

Izzo, David Garrett; Kirkpatrick, Kim, eds. (15 July 2014). Huxley's Brave New World: Essays. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-8003-6.

Postman, Neil (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. USA: Penguin USA. ISBN 0-670-80454-1.

Russell, Robert (1999). Zamiatin's We. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. ISBN 978-1-85399-393-0.

Higgins, Charles; Higgins, Regina (2000). Cliff Notes on Huxley's Brave New World. New York: Wiley Publishing. ISBN 0-7645-8583-5.

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Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist.

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Regarding the teaching material, I prefer to learn this emoji language. So in addition to the images, I will also put English translations on them.

Or I could add a medium like a point-and-shoot pen like this on the final outcome? (I'm not sure about the translation of the pen.)

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Your project is shaping up well Pearl – what is missing is clarity in what you are trying to communicate. Are you suggesting we cannot communication accurately with emojis? Are you suggesting conversation in the future will be more interpretive? Do you believe there can be a universal language etc.? These are the bigger, more critical questions, you will need to ask through your project to bring it to a level of postgraduate study.

- Frame the story book more clearly as an artefact from you speculative future, emoji society. Could this be in the form of an introduction? Or something that ‘sets the scene’ like an illustration? There is an element of this coming through in the timeline of language evolution you have generated.

- You mention the emojis, and the possible future of a emoji society could result in many problems. I’d like you to explore these problems through additional digital editing of the emoji (as you did with the cover of your presentation). This additional layering of information could be the next step on the language timeline, after the traditional emoji.

- Should the text exist in your book? I suggest using a French fold to hide the text from the viewer, so they are required to interpret. Alternatively, could you create a series of these books with the same story but the emojis have been interpreted in several different ways, therefore generating different stories?

The interpretation of the emoji language is interesting over different languages because of the ordering of the emojis, but perhaps also over different disciplines – my practice uses visuals. Bloom’s practice uses words.

- Interesting that you are manipulating the emoji’s on the first page with blur – is this something you can apply to your book? What other effects can you apply to the emoji (these could be informed by the current issues with emoji’s you highlight).

- Create a research booklet to showcase your experiments.

Good luck with the project Pearl – looking forward to seeing the final results in a few weeks.

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This is a great development Kate. The game rules are very clear, and you have explained them well.

- Consider the design decisions you are making with more criticality (e.g. typefaces, illustration style, colour schemes, materials of paper/chess pieces etc.) All of these decisions impact the message you are trying to communicate with the game, so they must be chosen, and tested, carefully.

- The chess board having varying heights is an excellent example of a design decision you have made that reinforces your concept.

- Over the next few weeks I’d like you to think about production. What materials and processes are you going to use to make your chess pieces, cards and the instructions? Are you putting the game into a box? What is the game called? Could all 4 be different materials that represent different wealth/value?

- In your final presentation make sure you summarise your research, tests and iterations of the game so we can see an overview of your process.

- Finally, it would be useful to take professional photos of people playing your game that you can use in the presentation and your portfolio.

Good luck, and looking forward to the final presentation on 10th August.

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As always, I’m very impressed with your commitment to your studies Swany. The project is in a really good place, so I’d encourage you to spend the next few weeks really pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.

- Producing your research document (Physically? Digitally) Think about your themes of time and repetition? Can you use this in the way you produce your work? Perhaps you create two editions, one very quickly, one over a really long duration of time? Perhaps you can find ink that doesn’t last forever? Perhaps there’s an online version with a countdown to when it’s no longer available?

- Where do you envision the film being shown? Is this a visual representation of your research / a tool to communicate your research, or a film to pose questions / a provocation to the audience?

- if it is to be used as a new time template, how can you illustrate this? Through mock-ups? The film on the wall where a clock should be, or on the bedside table where an alarm clock should be, or on a wrist watch? etc.

- The film ends  abruptly – should it loop forever? A title? Caption? Credit?

Really looking forward to the final presentation Swany. Have a great couple of weeks.

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Hello Abbie！

I have gained a lot during this short-term course and it has been very helpful to me. Thank you very much for teaching us during this time.

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Hello, Abbie!

Thank you very much for your help and guidance during these weeks of the course, I feel that I have made a lot of progress with your help.

In the past, when working on my projects, I always liked to expand the direction indefinitely and then focus on it slowly. In this project, I followed the schedule of the course and felt that I could focus on a keyword faster and conduct in-depth research. (Thank you for the reference here too! Especially when I don't understand the meaning of "interface".), and finally deduced my outcome. All this process has made my mind clearer, and I think I will follow this method when I do projects later.

In addition, I found that after communicating with you during this period, I can better express my project concepts and ideas in English, and I also learned a lot of presentation skills, which is very helpful! Moreover, I also enjoyed the "interview" part at the end of the presentation, and your advice on interviewing was also very helpful.

Very happy to meet you! You always guide me patiently and give very helpful feedback and references, hoping that I can be your junior sister in RCA and meet you in London!

Finally, thank you again for being so helpful to me over the past few weeks！💕

Swany

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Holle Abbie！

First of all， thank you very much for your guidance during this time, I feel I have gained a deeper understanding of design itself and how it works.

In fact, in my previous work, I often ignored the viewer's perspective, in other words, I always concentrated on expressing myself without thinking about the audience, or the readers, and how they perceived my work. My early projects, for example, were personal and I liked them, but they were also not convincing enough.
But I've realized this now, so I hope I'll be able to document the feelings of those who experience them more in my next project.

Finally, thank you very much for your help over the last few days and I really look forward to meeting you in London one day.😄