
On the right you can see different colors representing different mind-sets. The blue part is the understanding for each other, I create with my designs.
In this society I see a lot of cultural conflicts. Many people are raised to see other people as different. This causes dispute and sometimes even war. People see things they don’t know as different, and what is different is dangerous. Also languages and heritage causes fear in this way, while these people should embrace their differences. Their difference makes them special and beautiful.
Some persons voice their fear for others in the form of hate and anger. I see these persons as the “leaders”. These people convince others of this anger and hate. I call the people that are being convinced the “followers”. The best way to stop this is to change the mentality of the followers by creating self-empowerment for them. By making the followers start to think for themselves, the leaders will lose strength and the followers can take responsibility of their own thoughts and believes.
Due to the globalization people from many different background start living really close together, they easily move to the same place. Due to the globalization this problem is much more relevant. At the same time the cultural immunization becomes much easier. At this moment the communication flow between culture groups living closely together is instant and anonymous which in my eyes is very dangerous. With cultural groups I mean macro and micro cultures. My observations do also apply to for instance groups of colleagues that can’t understand their colleagues from other departments.
Vision on Design:
The challenge is to change behavior of the followers from an ignorance following attitude towards making them think for themselves and have a critical attitude towards others opinions.
To do this I will create cross-cultural communities. These communities should be put together apart from their obvious context. This way you meet people from different cultures in another setting and you might even become friends with them. This way the difference is not there anymore. Everyone is equal. The difference becomes the beauty.
This video clip (Sorry is only in Dutch) was an important inspiration and recognition for me to actually shape my written vision.