Recently, a very controversial movie in China called Jiang Ziya, talks about the author’s thinking on the issue of “saving one person or saving the human beings”. Even the movie itself if disappointed and the completeness and fullness of the story is not enough to support such a thoughtful and worth discussing concept it wants to express, but I do think this is indeed a very interesting proposition and concept, and I agree with the author to some extend on his opinion “We cannot save the human beings if we do not try to save every signal person”
This triggered my thoughts on landscape design. Similarly, although Design Justice often discusses or mentions concerns about marginalize groups. However, in reality, there are still many designs that are driven by capital, actively or unconsciously embedding inequality. They often focuses on a wider range of people, or even takes “most” , the general people as the subject of users for granted. For example, Kodak cameras will default to people who use their products are white people and their product cannot even recognize black skin! Another example is that computer keyboards also default to letters dominate languages and provide convenience to this language system. When it comes to landscape field, there are some “over design” places just to attract wealthy people to come in or to buy the houses next the places and overlook the need of the native community or the poor people, even does harm to them. Or almost all good-looking designs that focus on visual aesthetic and visual attraction cannot be appreciated by the people who are visually impaired.
So, I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss the animals and the native community in this project. It not only offers the design itself a brand new and interesting view, but also give us designers a chance to bearing design justice in mind and design out o empathy. When we are working on this projects, we designers have to treats animals and people on an equal position, instead of just designing for humans, and neglecting the fact that the place also serves as a living place for animals.