Institute of Art Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire
Ireland’s campus for the Creative Industries

Joe Phelan 

BA [Hons] Visual Communication Design

Hi my name is Joe, my friends call me Joe. I love the design process, and the opportunity it affords me to think critically and creatively. I'm particularly attracted to connecting and communicating ideas through design fiction, typography, writing and art direction. The prospect of creating individual, interesting and insightful solutions that respond to the specific parameters at play within a project are at the heart of my design practice. I have a keen interest in film. I pout when I'm shy.

Archium

This project is a design fiction focused on Archium, an organisation dedicated to preserving and archiving human knowledge. Founded in response to the Global Knowledge Crash of 2038, they are part of a revolution that seeks to counteract a loss of trust in who generates and controls knowledge in a world of deep fakes, fake news and the absence of verification frameworks.

Archium are committed to being an apolitical and non-profit project, funded by digital memory taxes administered by The Confederation of Digital Preservation and paid by private tech superpowers.

Archium produces a publication annually. It includes journalistic analysis submitted by the public and a 'vault' within the artefact where readers are invited to contribute their own physical materials. Contributors send back their completed submissions and these become 'time capsules' at Archium's centralised repository.



I Play, Therefore I Man.

My dissertation explores the different forms of masculinity portrayed by Action Man between its inception in 1966 and demise in 2009. It considers this in the framework of how gender is defined and performed through toys, focusing on the imagined figure of the adventure hero, of which the soldier is one iteration. It examines the interrelationship between this, the toy soldier and the pleasure culture of war in the context of boyhood play.