Something my supervisor had mentioned the previous week was that while my original submission of my setup in semester 1 was okay as an exploration. That was about it. It was only okay as an exploration. So there was actually a lot that could be improved on. Hence I felt it was time for another retrospective on how it could be improved.

While initially annoyed, this exercise made me realise the validity of my supervisor’s remarks. It also made me realise that I already had a great starting point for this new direction the project was taking. All that was left to just build on top of it.

Oddly enough, I somehow ended up latching onto the idea of taking the creative industry back to the past where it was simply just a tradeskill. This led me down the rabbit hole of what office spaces back then looked like versus what they looked like now. But after some consideration, I realised that the messaging was likely to get lost, and people are likely to just take the installation literally. So I halted this exploration. What ended up being useful from this exercise was helping me reimagine my new setup with additional artefacts like coffee mugs, sticky notes, and whatever else that might make it feel more lived in as compared to the previous setup.

I also fell down a similar rabbit hole looking at retro aesthetics, but realised that beyond the gimmicky “modern retro” art directions, that real retro design and the corporate design language today shared many similarities, hence I settled on going for something that combined the two. Through a session of collating illustrations and marketing collaterals from some of the biggest companies globally, I had one interesting takeaway. That is, despite all the colour, despite the high quality of work, despite the dynamism and slight variations in the styles, that somehow they all lacked a soul. I might be jaded, but it felt a lot more like an entity was masquerading as a personality rather than actually having a personality itself.

Now of course, these were incredibly functional and has probably driven quite a bit of revenue to these companies. And they definitely are of high quality. This exercise just made me realise that I had some incorrect assumptions about the commodification of creativity. Initially I had just assumed that said commodification would just lower the quality of creative work. But now I realise that there’s a difference between templatised and mediocre design, and design that is just outright shit. Yes the creative work by these entities were mediocre and lacked real explorations and experimentations, but they were definitely far from being bad work. This was something I really wanted to emulate in my new art direction.

Lastly I also went back to successful projects of similar themes and categories to see if there was anything I could learn from them. I scoured several agency and award website, and it was oddly interesting that there weren’t that many projects that were speculating the future of work in an experiential futures format. I’m not too sure if this is due to the niche of my project or that I was searching for the wrong keywords, but the four projects that I could find were more than sufficient, considering the extensive moodboard of references I had already built last semester.

As I had done with the previous moodboarding exercise last semester, I noted down the projects that were most interesting to me. One major takeaway that I had was that, these projects were more or less along the same levels of scale and depth that I had originally wanted my project to be. It made me realise just how much I’m being held back due to the initial brief, the monetary resources, and the overall limitations of this being a school project.

Of course, as with my nature, while I was considerably annoyed at this realisation, I continued pressing on with figuring out how to adapt to my situation. I noted down the strengths of each project, and how I could adapt that strength to a smaller space like mine. Some of the more notable observations was the use of audio and lighting to immerse the audience in the scene itself. It also made me wonder if there was a need to use a live model or mannequin as I had initially envisioned. Granted, once again these were significantly bigger setups, but I definitely had some raw ideas to adapt these observations.

Armed with my new progress, I attended yet another consultation with my supervisor to discuss my new findings and directions. It was here that he agreed with many of the decisions i had made, such as avoiding the clichés and literals. Instead focusing on aspects such as creating a cohesive design system for this speculative company. It seemed there was also some clear value being found in my new focus on a modular installation that could be presented in a smaller format that ultimately acted as a tool to discuss these social issues that I was so passionate about.

We also briefly discussed the types of artefacts and how the installation itself might come to be laid out which gave me quite a bit to consider as he prompted me to go back and put all of these ideas together into a visual representation so that we could better evaluate it.

However, before doing so, I asked a pressing question that I had. Considering that this atelier that I was in was the computational atelier, I was concerned that without my interactive AI prototype, there would be virtually no computation in the final presentation of this setup. We then discussed what computation meant.

After an additional discussion with another lecturer, I guess my concerns were somewhat put to rest as there were many aspects of computation that were likely going to be in the final outcome anyways. Ranging from potentially using AI for voiceovers to the presentation of all the technical explorations I had embarked on.