Seeking the Magic in Design: An Inquiry into Defamiliarizing the Everyday

This thesis project explores the application of the artistic and literary genre of magical realism to graphic design. The goal is to use the genre’s ability to defamiliarize everyday Indian cultural objects in order to reveal the magical in the mundane. Apart from a discourse on design and its role in the everyday, the research also focuses on making an audience conscious of their habitual responses to quotidian life through graphic design. Using magical realist graphic design, everyday Indian cultural objects are morphed into objects worthy of notice and appreciation. These transformed objects challenge an audience to recognize the ideologies perpetuated in a culture through everyday objects. The objects are chosen as a result of the author’s nostalgia experienced due to a displaced cultural context from India to Canada. The projects made during this thesis, “Pigment,” “Paper Cones” and “Clay” constitute an away-from-home “survival kit.”