Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

James Stedmond 

BA [Hons] Visual Communication Design

Hello there! I'm James, and I believe in always challenging myself creatively when designing. Impactful design often requires bold approaches, my work increasingly exploring the potential of modern technologies as mediums for design. This design experimentation is often informed by the speculative and futuristic concepts I choose to tackle, my interest in the future present in my digital motion work but also my print. Every now and then however, I do enjoy entirely stepping away from the screen to make scale models.

ALTAR

A satirical speculative dream decoding and documentation app in the year 2027 that uses your online activity to analyse and decode your dreams. Simply awake, record your dreams, and ALTAR will do the rest. Using your dream audio recordings, ALTAR compares your dream and online activity to find patterns, helping you gain personal insights into your waking life. Along with decoding your dream symbols, ALTAR gives you a digital recreations of each dream symbol, generated using a neural network, mimicking how dreams are made through stitching together various memories.

ALTAR is a social commentary on how Big Tech knows more about us than we know about ourselves. In the digital age we've all lost our privacy to Big Tech, our dreams becoming our one escape. ALTAR wants to take this from us, to know us, to own us.



UNCLE BEN'S RICE: MAINTAINING THE MYTH OF BLACK INFERIORITY

Following the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, Mars Inc. declared it would be rebranding Uncle Ben’s Rice, retiring the image of Uncle Ben and rebranding as Ben’s Original. This thesis sets out to investigate why Uncle Ben’s removal was necessary, demonstrating how the Uncle Ben’s Rice brand contributed to the killing of George Floyd by maintaining the myth of black inferiority. For seventy five years Uncle Ben’s name and imagery maintained this myth by reinforcing and perpetuating negative racial stereotypes which caused harm to black lives in the United States. The thesis is divided into two chapters: The Racist History of Uncle Ben’s Rice (1937-2007) and The Rebranding of Uncle Ben’s Rice (2007-2021).