Reimaginations
African Americans in Advertising - Images, Stereotypes, and Symbolism: Dissecting Social, Cultural and Historical Meanings in Images to Explore the Dynamics of Social Power and Ideology that Produced Them
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Omari Souza
Through advertising, designers play a vital role in crafting a product’s identity. These identities construct cultural “myths” and morality of products, teams, political affiliations, and their respective consumers. A brand is a visual signifier of a lifestyle that imbues the consumer’s social status with the economic and social value of the products they use. While this may have positive economic implications, the consumer’s subscription to various brand narratives can encourage tribalism in addition to negatively impact the understanding of others. For example, the characteristics and symbols that have historically been used to represent blacks in advertising have forged permanent images of African Americans into the American psyche. These characteristics have exceeded the conventional boundaries of symbols and evolved into an icon. These icons have had detrimental impacts on African Americans who reside in western society. The work of dissecting social, cultural, and historical meanings in images is to explore the dynamics of social power and ideology that produced them. This research examines the manifestation of widely shared social assumptions of African Americans in Advertisements of the Jim Crow South. The 1940s psychological experiment Doll Test will be used to contextualize the impact of these images and will conclude by drawing parallels between racist ads of the past and current ads that echo similar motifs.
Branding Nature: Design and the Inception of the Pacific Northwest Apple Industry View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cristina de Almeida
During the early twentieth century, the Pacific Northwest entered the imagination of Americans living in the Eastern and Midwestern urban centers of the United States through the branding of its natural resources. Among the most pervasive images were those related to the marketing of apples. Colorful labels, identifying growers and/or packers, were pasted on fruit crates that were shipped East through the new transcontinental railroads, and later put on display in the grocery shops. The graphics on these labels provide a window to begin to understand how design was used not only as a tool to support product commodification, but also as a means to negotiate the fears and contradictions brought upon by industrialized agriculture. This study explores the phenomenon of the branding of Northwest apples in the first half of the twentieth century, with a focus on design practices. While establishing differentiation between similar products–apples to apples–visual branding contributed to forge a unified identity for a region that was still culturally peripheral to Western society. This relative isolation can provide a microcosm from which to assess the potential and limitations of design as a mediator between systems of production and consumption.
Culture-intensive Artisanry: Reconceptualising Cultural Appropriation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Federica Vacca
The rediscovery of traditional production processes and the showcasing and promotion of the culture-intensive artisanry of a specific social community, leading to a profoundly different viewpoint on the global v. local dichotomy. Geographical identities lose their uniqueness, acquiring instead a pluralistic, hybrid character built on paradigms of convergence and intermixing of streams of relations that reconstitute the interactions among places, cultures, communities, people, habits, rituals and iconographies. While the local transforms into cosmopolitan specialty to increase its market appeal by leveraging the allure of the different and exotic, the global undergoes a process of indigenization of new cultural forms, thus acquiring new formal values. This is a process of cultural transition, which, via culture, connects social meanings through an innovative reinterpretation of processes that combine the richness of the time-honored, distinctive techniques proper to a given culture with the new expressive idioms of the contemporary world to develop products and services that leverage differentiation and personalization as a means of reinvigorating a culture of design. The reservoirs of material culture and artisanal techniques typical of a specific community and its territory become more than just a heritage but also cultural capital. The paper considers, through the analysis of different case studies, the particular legacy with the culture of a territory leads to a vision that sees contemporary techniques become effective narratives with explicit, functional, and descriptive content, but also with implicit, emotional content that evokes other meanings, i.e. they assume symbolic values of a social and cultural nature.
Thai Contemporary Jewelery Research View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Supavee Sirinkraporn
Humans have long had a culture of jewelery usage. This is supported by archeological evidence from pre-historic period such as Greek, Roman, ancient Egypt through to modern days. This paper reviews trends in Thailand, where evidence can be seen from Dhavaravati, Sukhothai, Ayutthaya to Rattanakosin period. The artefacts found allow us descendants to learn and appreciate how jewelery is cleverly used as amulets and delicate craftsmanship of the ancient people. Trails of the evidence can be traced from pre-historic to A.D. 1970 to the current period of Post Modernism, which is in the reign of King Rama IX. Through these periods, it can also be seen that ideas towards jewelery have changed over time and it is no longer used for a sole purpose of indicating status of its wearer.
