Constructed realities
To be creative is to be curious. Ideas and inspiration come from the world around us and the desire to know more about something we encounter. Other than a short stint in college working in retail, a brief time in my early 20s post-college recession jobs working in a call center and a very disastrous attempt at being an Administrative Assistant, I have been blessed to have worked primarily in creative jobs as a designer. As such it is part of my job to be curious and imaginative.
My job is about the future,
My day job as a Product Designer involved envisioning and designing systems for products or services that span across different touchpoints. To do this, I use a human-centered design process using contextual research, factual data, to identify the needs and desires of the people who will interact with the system to design experiences that are appropriate and compelling.
Since that time I have moved on to leading and managing teams of designers and my job has changed from one of being the hands-on person making the design to coaching, directing and supporting my team to make things that will exist in the future, and about ten years ago I added teaching design to my repertoire of ways I deal with the future.
I love what I do but I have been feeling a need to return to more experimentation in the work I create. I am drawn to pursuing the more creative and experimental and artistic expressions of design rather than the practical and commercial.
This has coalesced into a hybrid form of creative expression I am calling Constructed realities.
Constructed realities
Constructed realities are a genre of staged photography. I was enchanted by the images of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons. And my investigation into this work led me to discover that as far back as the 1850s and postmortem photography this act of creating reality from fiction has existed.
In college, this led me to create a series of photographs that featured models posed in situations that led the viewer to presume a relationship between two unrelated figures based on the angle they were photographed.
When I left college in the late 1990s the internet was just becoming a thing. My love of history and the medium of the internet inspired a series of self-created digital photos and found photos used to create short, mostly creepy and eerie stories.
In the 2000s I was interested in and worked an emerging genre of internet-enabled Alternate Reality Games or ARGs. This blending of fact and fiction and traversing between digital and physical realms has been my passion for my personal work.
In my next incarnation of creative work, I am refocusing attention on the pursuit of multidisciplinary pursuits with explorations on futures that involve using technology.
A uchronia refers to a hypothetical or fictional time-period of our world, in contrast to altogether fictional lands or worlds. A concept is similar to alternate history but different in the manner that uchronic times are not easily defined (mainly placed in some distant or unspecified point before current times), sometimes reminiscent of a constructed world.
Things that are not as they are but, how they might be
I am creating are artifacts from a future world that does not exist yet but could exist. Through pastiche, historical references and designed objects, clothing, and multimedia I have created pieces that represent the world I want to exist. In the upcoming year I will be releasing three pieces of this collection.
The first is an interactive story called U4RiA which describes the experience of a protagonist who experiences life in two future utopian cities and experiences very different outcomes.
The second is a series of designed objects, clothing, a household item and a form of transportation from these imagined cities.
And, finally, a description of the jobs and companies that are designed for the future we are facing based on current megatrends.
In this way, I intend to blend my design, writing, theater and creative skills into a body of work that represents my creative capacity.
