Wrap

At the end of the year 2000, I was assigned to an investigation on suicides committed among the marine force of the Greek Army. My aim was to create a poster-campaign that prevented soldier suicide. The question at that time, was: how could I convince the average, desperately disillusioned, young soldier that he should trust in friendship and love to find support, while at the same time having to lie and pretend to everyone, in order to cope with the great theater that is the military and society in effect?

Designers nowadays, are generally required to take action to maneuver branding into a socially responsible context. The implication to this, is resembling a loop, a short-circuiting that keeps progress in stasis.
What values, criteria and moral codes a brand communication designer follows, is subjectively determined by the specialized individual’s personal ideology; yet that same ideology is, paradoxically, a product of branding, too. The designer is by default a consumer him/her-self. Branding and brand communication design have therefore to be examined from an alternative, more spherical and objective point of view.

Merits

The No Brand project has set new grounds for the study of Branding and Identity Design, as human process, cause and effect.

The aims and objectives of the original contract of study, were met successfully and a theory on branding for designers has been introduced and brand-designed.

"Referral", a graphic dissertation summarizing the No Brand project, is also delivering the study to a wider audience.

Limitations

The No Brand project was very much compromised with corporate university politics and limited to qualitative research and self reflection that was constantly under censorship scrutiny.

The university in which it took place had taken the common blow of privatization, minimizing investment on academic staff. Consequently, it couldn't offer sufficient supervision, intellectual support and academic debate.

English is not my first language and my native language doesn't even contain a word for branding. Certain concepts fall into the risk of having been expressed inadequately.

referral

You've got to make fun of it in the end, it was too bloody serious. If only it had been funnier throughout...

The End?

At last it came. The end of the last term. If anyone told me that the MA was a fleeting experience, I would smack them. It was almost as bad as military service. Long, uncomfortable, expensive and strainful.
I would have liked the end of the MA phase to be the end of the project, too. I would have taken a nice holiday back home and I would put it aside for a while. But despite the fact that I submitted a huge amount of work, including naturally the printed version of SubSpecieDesign in a book featuring my critical review and reflection on the project, there still existed a major unsolved problem: THE ASSESSMENT BOARD DIDN'T GET IT.
What a bunch of ...
So I got a referral brief: more work to celebrate the work already completed.
And I must say, I am really thankful.
Because I got to put together a new device to articulate the Branding and Ethics thing, one that gave me a chance to revise the whole submission, outside of the university routine and intellectual limitations: SubSpecieDesign Referral.

Articulation

The video.
I had been watching a lot of BBC, Channel 4 and other documentary films and I thought, if I could make a documentary-style presentation and introduction to my diagrams and thought-patterns on the subject, it would have been easier to see what fits where and which bits needed clarification. I hadn't quite expected it to be so amusing but it ended up very impressively.
It was an exercise I designed myself.
For the record, when I started this production, I had plans for an English actress to be the presenter, but it didn't work out and I presented it myself - with my girlfriend shooting me on a miserable day, between regular rainy sprays, on various locations in lovely Nottingham (thanks Ven). I applied a yellow-orange filter to the film later, to give a sense of seeing the way I was seeing through those lenses I was wearing (- what a film-director!).
I think that talking about branding in this quiet and haunted setting brings a deeper dimension to it, than a bigger and noisier city like Manchester or London (or Athens) would have done.
And in case you are reading this without having noticed, the video has two parts. A three minute long one where I'm performing an introduction to the theoretical context of my No Brand Manifesto, and a seven minute one where I'm explaining a few things about my diagrams, like in a guided tour of SubSpecieDesign.org. A virtual tour of a virtual site within that virtual site...
And yes I edited it, wrote its original soundtrack and designed its mesmerizing sound myself.
Quite a lot of work on top of everything else.
But it was worth it. And it did work extremely well, adding a most important grip to my investigation and a you-tube, social media aspect, too. My scruffiness alone as a documentary film-star is a point of reference for a much wider audience than my research was targeting at its beginning. Ha ha.

The Plan

Here it is! I think this is what Stuart was hoping for in terms of visualization of what I've been trying to say since the first term. At this point my project begun becoming easier to articulate. Better late than never. Sorry Stuart is no longer there as my supervisor. Happy to have Peter Lester in his place though.

Civilization Under the Aspect of Design

OK. This was a huge leap of the imagination. I don't know where exactly it crossed the boundaries of Design and it became Anthropology or even Archaeology, but it happened and it was a revelation that needed to be transcribed into diagrams to make sense. It was cooking in my head all PGD term, but I had to do a lot more literature review before I could pin it down to "bionics". Then I could really appreciate how useful mind-mapping can be!

The No Brand

It is kind of absurd to call a brand "Brand" or "No Brand", it mushes up communication. So after long and careful thought, I ended up choosing "Sub Specie Design" for my end-product.
And just to make sure that I have stated the thing I think of as my end-product, it is a web publication of a view of the world under the aspect of design, a picture of reality where the existence of brands is accepted as the key to peace and prosperity, a tool for discerning branding and ethics philosophically and practically and finally a way to take control of the game... THE Game. Reality, that is. Life in the 21st century. Globalization or Glo-banal-ization. The physical thing or its theoretical abstract.
And it isn't my end-product really, it is my project's end-product.
And No Brand is also a brand.

at war with ourselves

It is quite horrifying, so we tend to avoid thinking about it. We are calling it several names, but it never registers as variations of the same old thing. Heraclitus, 2500 years ago, had said that "War is the Father of all things", an axiom that we tend to discard, because we don't want any bloody war! A bloodless war in this case, is called marketing. It might also be sport-games. Or politics. Or whatever. We make weapons, toys, ideologies and brands. We can't stand the sight of physical brutality so we make it psychological, fighting for imaginary credit values. Fighting against War and against ourselves.
Isn't this the higher purpose of Art and Design, to make War constructive instead of destructive? Can it be that branding, although originally meaning fencing of sorts, is actually the best means we have to satisfy that bloody thirst of our species for War, peacefully?

getting to the bone

I have called the folder with the images above "sublime". This is some of the visual investigation I did in order to find the best expression for the feeling of being under seige from an extraterrestrial force, that is how I experience the unison of branding and ethics. Of course, the English rain was there all the time that I was looking for an appropriate metaphor, so I found it pretty accurate to start with a rain of brands model. After all, we are soaked to the bone by brands. It's mesmerizing to look at the rain, but it's shocking to look at the bone. The bone in the last two pictures (the remains of a very tasty meal), is the kind of bone older generations would "read", divining the future after a fashion.

PGD end presentation

PGD term overview

In one sentence, this term, to me, was amazing, hard, mind-bending and life-changing.