Changing Worlds?

The poster for the first Changing Worlds Conference is off to the printers!

Poster for the Changing Worlds Conference 2014. On a white Background, 3 views of planet earth are in the bottom left corner. Together they show a full world map. A lot of cultural and technical artifacts grow out of the worlds. On top we have a billboard with the conference title, the contact details are in the bottom right corner.

The pencil sketch became a full poster.

With this poster I wanted to illustrate the multiplicity of human experiences that is also the basis for the name of the conference, ”Changing Worlds”.

We are used to seeing maps of the world centering (and disproportionally enlarging) Europe and North America. So the first decision we made when we decided to put a globe on the poster was to duplicate it to feature all continents.It was very interesting since deviating from the image most people are used to is ocnfusing at first. The 3 globes also appear in different styles, highlighting that maps are always purpose-driven rather than neutral objects.

Arranged around the 3 globes you can see a strange selection of techno-cultural artifacts. The idea behind this was to question what “technology” and ”society” can mean in this context. When someone tells me about a technology conference nowadays, I tend to think about computers and phones. We wanted to make clear that our approach would be wider, centered on the human experience, and decided to visualize that. We came up with a range of objects that span thousands of years of human civilisation. Some of them are part of contemporary discourse and technological developments, others we usually take for granted.

I ended up doing the illustrations with pencil and paper, further challenging the idea of technology as something neutral while emphasizing human impact.