Searching for possibilities in the gaps of what is known

Sammanfattning: What I do is about finding solutions and escaping limitations. I am looking for possibilities in the gaps of what is known. My name is Oskar. I am an illustrator gone graphic designer gone somewhere else. I work with form, I work with tools. Through this report I will tell you the story of how form takes form. Of how the tools and processes we work with influence the visual language we produce, and reproduce.This will be a journey through the possibilities and impossibilities of design. I will tell you about my attempts to escape. To de-learn and relearn. I will share my tactics and my process. For the last year I have been looking for ways to surprise myself. To ask questions that give unexpected answers. I have focused on the production of form. The dialogue between me, my material and my tools. A dialogue I want to share with you through this report. In my project I want to use practice to reveal and avoid the limitations I find in the tools that I use. These limitations are not general and applicable to the whole field of graphic design, but are based on my practice and experience. By using doing as a way of thinking I look for and think about what I experience as limiting and how these limitations can be escaped. I believe that to look closely at the tools and processes used to make form can be a way to understand how ways of working and choices of tools influence visual language. In order to do this I have chosen to look at the tools I use the most. I want to investigate the inherit possibilities of the tools and processes that I use in my practice by questioning their methods and uses. In the process of finding new entry points to parts of my practice I hope to, in a hopeful and constructive way, produce new ideas and visual expressions instead of reproducing old ones. It can be problematic to use few tools, especially when these tools are not consciouslychosen by the designer but by the field and the market, as the values they representare reproduced in our design. I want to discuss the importance of defining one’s tools, their uses and what they are used for. I feel that a field so heavily dependant on so few, almost compulsory tools, needs discussion and a width of perspective. No tools should be removed from the toolbox, however I think we need a wider spectrum of tools and an understanding of how they influence how we think about, think with, understand and learn through the practice of design.