Idea inspiration
My thoughts came from Milton Glaser's article —— AMBUIGUITY AND TRUTH .The author described when he finished reading the book by Leo Steinberg called the Incessant Last Supper， He thought of the time he had seen the restoration process of Da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper with his own eyes., and seeing an ambiguous ambiguity in this painting by Leonardo 'Why would the clearest mind in human history introduce so much ambiguity in a work designed to influence the audience? ’So he started a series of thinking about ambiguity and truth.
From instances of being deceived in life to the road to hell,
‘...lying has become acceptable in our public life.’
‘I’m not sure when the word “spin” replaced “lie”’
‘Marketing can be shameless.’
‘…a lie repeated often enough, becomes the truth.’
People's views of truth and lies are being played with, but they are uniting in society. Despite the awakening of excessive consumerism, most people in society cannot see through their false appearance. When the naivety and/or ignorance of consumers is deeply ingrained in their brains, is it unfair to blame them for their naivety and/or ignorance?
Milton Glaser’s approach to this topic is that being lied to is an all too common occurrence in today’s consumer society. We are lied to so often that we are becoming immune to it and are starting to accept it as normality. In his essay ‘Ambiguity and Truth’ he gives examples and analogies of how we are deceived by advertising and states that as a society ‘we can no longer recognise them as lies’ and ‘the assault has changed our brains and our view of reality and truth.’ In relation to social responsibility, it is clear that the people running these campaigns either do not feel a sense of responsibility to their audience or they are not acting on it. It gives the impression that there are goodies and baddies of design, those who care and those who don’t, but the truth is that there is no distinctive line between the two.
This is where Milton Glaser's ‘Road to Hell’ becomes relevant. The Road to Hell is a list of 11 questions that ask designers to what extent they will deceive their audience. The problem becomes more and more difficult. The first is to make the packaging look larger than it actually is, and the last is to design advertisements for products that may eventually lead to the death of users. It forces creatives to think about their morals in relation to their practice and the various stages of difficulty in answering the questions shows that a sense of social responsibility is not a black and white concept. It is a scale which creatives have their place within.
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