Information Design
I designed a poster that not only informs, but critically activates students on campus to learn about and from the past. The poster is designed to spark a reflective experience of what you know about South Africa's past and how it is effecting the present moment.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was enacted in 1995 to help South Africa deal with its past, bring reconciliation to those who were harmed, a voice to the silenced and to be the driving factor for a new and united country. The commission handled more than 20 000 cases, bringing some peace to some victims and between them and the perpetrators. This was done by making every effort to disclose the truth.
Almost 30 years later, we still deal with a lot of hurt and injustice in our rainbow nation.
The ABC Project
How we encode the world is by searching for patterns all around us. One of the first patterns we were taught is the skill of recognising letters in the alphabet, learning the alphabet in order and making connections between the letters and possible meanings for example a is for apple etc. As we get older our world gets more complex but we still encode information and try to make sense of things by searching for patterns and comparing them to our internalised archive of information.
Our archives form a central part of us and allow us to make sense of the world around us. Something that is deeply embedded into our subconscious is our learning process when we first started to read and get to know our ABC's.
Our teachers play a big role in helping us make sense of the world. They teach us our ABC’s and how to read but also the basic ABC's of life. They help equip us with a tool kit to stand up for what we believe in and live a life that matches the values instilled in us. The reading process just like forming foundations takes place by practicing (letters) and making important associations with each one.
The ABC Project is an information design project that challenges the viewer to rethink their basic associations with simple concepts like A-Z. This is also a play on the basics of the case by displaying it in an engaging narrative way. The project is structured as a typical grade 1 classroom worksheet.
By engaging the viewer in the process of encoding the audience gets taken back to their school year archive and there is a shock element involved when seeing the stark contrast of the recognisable structure and the heavy subject matter.
My Process
Ahmed Timol was an educator. We associate teachers with soft heartedness, even innocence. I wanted to highlight that Ahmed is a fellow human. His occupation also creates a great contrast with the case and his tragic murder.
As a teacher he was entrusted with the lives of many children yet his was taken away. He was teaching the children under his care the basic things like their ABC’s, telling them stories of justice and change. I wanted to make the ability to teach my central point for the case. By doing this I highlight Ahmed's vulnerability - being a mortal human and take the idea of educating a person about his case. This is all done in a structure that all people can immediately recognise because we all did similar worksheets in school.
A then becomes Ahmed's story and his unfair treatment. B the building he fell out of and C the other main characters, the caption and colonel who held Timol in custody, was responsible for his life but killed him.
I started by mimicking the way children would write. Mark-making is a big part of this project and I used it very specifically to make this case personal to me and show the emotions I worked through while processing the unfairness of what happened. The structure was set up to create the feel that you were looking at a filled in grade one school worksheet.
The three-part poster is specifically placed at the Ou Hoof Gebou (Law Building) on the Stellenbosch University Campus to engage people who are currently studying our law and teaching them in a basic ABC structure of the injustices of the past. This structure is sort of tongue in the cheek when seen in this setting because of the childlike features but in reality the justice or in justice in our world can be taken back to something as simple as a building block in a child's life, something instilled in them to either fight and make a change or damaged those who want to be the change.
The ABC Project T-shirt Design
My process for designing this simple T-shirt design started by asking three, six year olds to write their A, B and C letters for me. This gave me a reference as to what children's handwriting looks like at that age and also inspired the simplicity of the design. The association I want people to make after engaging with this project is simply A should have been for Ahmed Timol not the assault, the assassination and all the abrasions to his body parts.
