The MDes Publics Group approached this project from a point of reflective practice where we considered how we are all feeling at this current moment in time and attempted to mimic those feelings into our digital self-portraits. By combining design, technology, art and protest, we saw this as an opportunity to critique the effects of traditional design culture and decompress how we are adjusting to graduate school as design students at Harvard. It is from this notion that we all decided to animate exploding digital self-portraits.

We chose to insert our digital self-portraits into a constructed “Russian Doll” to represent “social norms” in different scales (global society, western culture, the design profession, etc.) and how they were constructed create order and harmony. Disorder can be considered anything outside of the Russian doll.

Our animation depicts our individual digital self-portraits inside of the Russian doll. The time lapse then shows our body (neck, shoulders, and back of head) exploding and a spring pushing our faces forward and beyond the bounds of the Russian Doll which displays that even though we may be experiencing fatigue, we still aim to challenge traditional concepts of society and design pedagogy.

Read more about “The Russian Doll Syndrome” on Medium by Shaikha Al-Hashem