Subjective reality – Media mix and reorganization in graphic design

Graphic design meets a design requirement or serves a design mandate in many scenarios. What role can graphic design play when we focus on social issues? With the evolution of society, numerous social problems tend to be increasingly complicated, involving intercultural communication or sensitive political stances. The design could not solve these social problems directly. But if we consider design as a manner of communication, it conveys controversial social matters to the public more effectively with critical or speculative thinking. The real social situation could be revealed from the disruptive information, that is, design to “raise” the question. This thesis consists of the following three sections. The first section is the comprehension of Subjective Reality. People perceive the shallow reality as a dualism: “true” or “false.” The reality investigated in this study goes further on this basis. In terms of the demonstration of “subjective” and “reality” in different disciplines, subjective cognition constructed people’s perception of the world, which leads to the “reality” with multiple dimensions. The second part is a further analysis of the causation of Subjective Reality. Through investigation, it is found that several divergent realities existed in the same news events on account of different positions of the media. Besides, if we trace back the history of aesthetics, we could recognize that the tendency altered radically from “perfect illusion” to “imperfect reality.” We could also assume that the reality of aesthetic hinges on the different epoch in this regard. Therefore, “Subjective Reality” can be ascribed to diverse stances and different eras. The third part is the design. In terms of the causation of Subjective Reality, materials related to stances and eras were collected from topical news and contemporary lifestyle. To facilitate the comprehension for spectators, the thesis project is assumed as a fictional independent publisher Reality Daily. The project intends to amplify the contradictions of diverse opinions by mixing and reorganizing of multi-media (print media and digital media), such as experimenting with different narrative structures to convey the sense of drama in the incident. The design results are in the form of brand design for Reality Daily, editorial design for magazines and newspapers, and web prototypes. As a consequence, the project could arouse deep ponderation and confronting concealed social problems by manifesting multiple layers of reality