XR Takeover Day: Article

BCU Print Club is a collective of staff, students and alumi which gives like-minded people a chance to play and make stuff in a non-academic platform. Created by Josh Cutts (alumni) and Beck Howson (lecturer) in 2017, I became co-director last year at the end of my second year. BCU Print Club revolves around sessions with different themes, which we decide beforehand, mainly using collage, letraset and printed imagery which we then like to Risograph print. 

The DM XR Takeover day was in one word thought-provoking as I went in which not much knowledge of what XR are about, so my mind was definitely opened to the themes which they spoke about. 

The part that impacted me the most was the talk which Clive Russell did in the Adelphi theatre as the way that he spoke about the social systems is something that I have never thought about in that way before.  

From listening to the talk that Russell gave I personally don’t think it is important to highlight the issues of climate change through design specifically; it’s important to highlight the issue of climate change through anything that suits you, so if design is your form of media then use it but in the words of Clive Russell ‘Design isn’t important’. 

We can continue to use design as a tool to raise awareness by helping to spread the message and educate people on why they need to make changes to save the planet as I believe that there are still a lot of people ignorant to this fact, so maybe changing tactics to reach a larger audience. 

As I have spoken about previously, the talk by Extinction Rebellion definitely had an impact on me and made me think differently. The beginning of the talk was more focused on the social systems rather than the environment which I found interesting as before the talk I thought all XR spoke about was climate change, so that part of the talk made me think of the government negatively and want to protest and go against the system which was probably their aim; to make people aware that the system isn’t fair or right. However, the end of the talk was more about climate change and the fact that design doesn’t matter because graphic design isn’t going to save the world, it’s the actions that you take that’s going to help.