Evoking the emotions of a local audience toward a foreign cause seems to be a complicated and unattainable process. There are lots of barriers to empathy, such as language, culture, and stereotypical biases that may separate human beings based on experiences, especially in the case in which audiences have not been necessarily previously engaged with people of backgrounds differing from their own. The question that comes to mind is: how might we use the deliberate tools of aesthetics and design to evoke the empathy of impartial bystanders so that they may take a stance for a cause that isn’t their own? And, in a globalized economy, could it be that no matter how far away a tragedy may be striking, we are all affected by the implications of the tragedy no matter how small or large? There’s a lot to fight for in today’s complicated political environment. Climate change, regional wars, human rights violations, exploitation of resources, etc. But if we all know of abysmal things that are happening in our own perception, why do we fail to address these issues effectively, leaving power and control to politicians?
Susan Sontag touches up on this ideology in her book, titled ‘regarding the pain of others,’ in which she explores the implications of the imagery of war on non-partial bystanders. She explains that images simplify situations and distort stories when used in propaganda adopted by affiliated news articles. Although brutal images of suffering agitate the viewer, they don’t necessarily do much more than create an illusion of consensus. Images of war, gathered by journalists are aimed at “making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore”. (Sontag) A successful example of this would be Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, two journalists who reported on the story and death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died at the hands of Iran’s morality police for not wearing her hijab properly, sparking nationwide protests in Iran that nearly overthrew the ruling Islamic Regime in September 2022. While such images are successful when used for a shock factor, they are not successful tools to facilitate long-term justice or stop wars from happening. In the modern society we live in, shock images of war and suffering have become a casual source of news we passively consume during our day, a modern entertainment sparked by the curiosity towards that which we’ll never personally experience. It helps build our moral compass and inform and shape our ideologies as a collective society.
Politically charged art does the same. It has the capacity to shock and inform; to evoke empathy. But unfortunately, empathy alone is not going to solve the problems of the world and we live in an era so heavily bombarded with imagery and media that politically charged art becomes merely a source of entertainment and impartial pity towards the suffering ‘other that is quickly replaced by self-motivated thoughts or other newer content. This leads one to wonder: how can technology be incorporated with design and a user-centered approach to engagement to create not necessarily a piece of art, but perhaps a product geared towards engagement and empathy through the manipulation of subjective aesthetics and most importantly, active measures for justice?
Images and information in galleries and social media garner observation, often with missing information or access to tools to join the cause. I first personally felt this firsthand when posting informative videos about the protests in Iran, but received comments from people eager to help but not knowing what else to do except share the content or people who saw my commemorative art and called it ‘touching’ and moved on with their lives. One way to address this would be by adding an extra path to the observer’s journey, transforming them from the observer to the active advocate. And in order to do so, the observer needs to first be informed of the cause, they need to identify with the cause through evoked empathy and be encouraged to act through carefully designed call-to-action tools. One art project that Visualizes injustice in an extremely effective manner is Matt Korostoff’s ‘Wealth Shown to Scale’, in which you are redirected to an extremely lengthy website with a visual scaled comparison of wealth distribution in America. This project is interactive through its incorporation of never-ending scrolling, it is visually informative, providing us with concrete, visual reference to an otherwise abstract concept of inequality, all the while incorporating a touch of humor. The only problem then would be that the viewer is made aware of the issue but isn’t necessarily informed on how to address the issue if they choose to do so, bringing about active change to the cause they are being informed of.
By adopting the principles of visual mapping and UX Design and researching its effectiveness through user research and testing, an app can be developed that not only brings into light the humanity and cultural background of a country/region through art but also uses visual mapping techniques such as those used by Mark Lombardi to make the complex issues being discussed more digestible, all the while providing aesthetically thought-through tools that civilians in countries like Iran could use to fill the role of “digital heroes” when witnessing state-sponsored injustices. In the age of technology and holistic surveillance, perhaps the same surveilling technology used to enforce power through fear can be used to dismantle the system by turning passive bystanders into active seekers of justice.
Reference:
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others (p. 47). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
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