Redacted

In design, we hide. We compress our own taste and style in service to the client’s; in academia we push our students to find their own voice, while refraining from imprinting ours. It’s become a social performance (Papacharissi, 2011). With today’s technologies it’s even easier to hide outside of the design world. With social media we can curate our identity, showing our best self to the world using the platform as a metaphorical mask (Turkle, 2011; Van Dijck, 2013). On LinkedIn we only post successes—never failures. Redacted is a visual representation of this disguise of body and space, depicting our fragmented identities as designers, using a mask to unmask those established norms. Redacted uses cross-stitching, an age-old craft, to symbolize the true representation of self, and 3D-printing, a frontier of modern technology, to represent a continuum of human ingenuity. Their connection symbolizes a temporal bridge, linking past and future through the enduring pursuit of creation and understanding. The stitched geometries represent different identities we put on every day. The process of creating the 3D-printed substrate was iterative. The substrate, made out of recyclable PLA filaments, couldn’t be too rigid or too flimsy. Hole sizes needed to be accurate in relation of thread coverage and needle size and couldn’t be too small (1/32”) or too large (3/32”). The plane couldn’t be too large or too small as it would be hard to hold. Multiple iterations of printing different thicknesses and hole sizes and then conducting test-stitching occurred before the final outcome: a 2” x 4” sized rectangle made of 4 layers of PLA, with a 1/16” hole size, spaced 1/16” apart. This work unpacks our collective disguise and empower our community to use our diverse identities as assets to expose and dismantle established norms. Design should privilege transparency and authenticity, not disguise it. Redacted serves as a tool to encourage conversation among the academic design community.