Flow – Design Methodologies Rapid Briefs (3)

This week we looked at how information moves through societies. We were told to get into pairs and think of a cultural myth that is widely believed within a society.

My partner (Jon) and I chose a Norwegian myth that had developed over time during the Plague/Black Death in Norway.

We’d chosen the Norwegian personification of the Black Death, called ‘Pesta’ (Pest is Norwegian for Plague, and Pesta would then be the person who was the plague). Many people believed in more rural areas that the Plague took the form of an old woman with a rake and a broom, who traveled from town to town to claim her victims. Though no one ever saw Pesta, it was widely believed that she existed, possibly as an attempt to understand what was happening at the time, and why so many people died from the disease.

It wasn’t until the 1800s that the disease was rationalised and understood in more scientific terms. This was when a Norwegian illustrator, named Theodor Kittelsen, created an image of Pesta.

One of the options for the finished product for this brief was to create a forged document. We had a workshop with Amy and Sadhna where we worked through the details the myth, and we then decided to create a poster that we imagined could have been distributed at the time, with false information. Norwegians believed that if they ran to the mountains that Pesta would not be able to find them there.

We went to the makeshift letterpress studio in the Graphic Design studio at Camberwell, and started to play around with headline notices.

Once the ink had dried on our headlines, we decided to hand-write the remainder of the message in Norwegian, build a collage of information, and print it on the riso printer (also in the GD studio). We hand-wrote information, as it was representative of how information traveled at the time. Either through word of mouth, or by Priests (who knew how to read and write).

We had attempted to write a Welsh poster for more modern times, where the opposite was being said. In the Norwegian poster, the advice is to run for the hills. For the Welsh, it would advise against it (during COVID-19 pandemic, where everyone wanted to come to Wales as it appeared safer).