Design Challenge and Design Ideas

How do you illustrate a thirty thousand word article?
How can the illustration(s)aid the narrative?
How do you create consistency and change in aesthetic and concept?

This article explains how our current idea of progress is immature: it is developmentally incomplete. Progress, as we define it now, ignores or downplays the scale of its side effects. Our typical approach to technological innovation today harms much that is not only beautiful and inspiring, but also fundamentally necessary for the health and wellbeing of all life on Earth. Developing a more mature approach to our idea of progress holds the key to a viable, long-term future for humanity.

How the brief was fulfilled

We designed over one hundred and twenty graphic images in the form of two Airfix sets. Once drawn and laser cut we added colour gradient backgrounds to help illustrate the complexity of the article’s highlighted problems and opportunities facing humanity.

Each element in the models was carefully chosen to align to the many topics covered in the (thirty thousand word) article.

Using photography we were able to show the human touch, craft and sense-making which is central to the project’s identity.