It All Starts from The Notebook
This project documents a year and a half of my design study at Pratt through the lens of survival. Rather than treating creative growth as a straight line, the project asks what happens when creation is no longer driven by ambition, but produced as residue, the leftover material of simply trying to function within a system built on capitalist productivity.
I see these residues and emotions as resisting capitalism's constant pull toward absorption and commodification. Five survival modes emerged from this process, each one a record of confusion and the search for a vocabulary that hadn't yet been invented. Instead of resolving these emotions into something clean, the book preserves their ambiguity, collecting them as they are and offering a new design language for working within contemporary post-capitalism.
THE CHALLENGE
Emotion resists translation. As a designer working under the conditions of late capitalism, the question was not how to express feeling, but how to give form to ambiguity without letting that form be absorbed and sold back as product. The existing vocabulary of design was not built for this.
THE SOLUTION
Rather than treating negative emotion as noise to filter out, this project treats it as raw material. Five survival modes, each born not from creative freedom but from the pressure of a system that leaves little room to breathe, are collected and translated into a working design language. What emerges in the end is a proposal: a new mode of design survival within the system.
