Past, Present, Future

A family memorial. The Past, Present, Future brief was instigated around the earliest memories of my grandparents. For my grandmother it was, “Grandma, please can I have a bag of JellyTots” and for my grandfather just simply medals, hats and grapes.

As both grandparents passed away when I was very young I only remember snippets of their lives and was intrigued to lean more. After finding objects once owned by them, the greatest and most significant items that stood out at me were my grandfather’s war medals from the Second World War. I saw these as a personal memorial in recognition for his services in the war, which in turn were given to him as an award.

As the theme of the project was going to be quite personal to me, it made sense to create a series of awards to be kept within my family. The Past represented by a remake of my grandfather’s medal, the Present by a certificate and the Future represented by an email. The reason behind the change of format is to identify the change of the public’s perception of receiving awards, as there has been much talk recently of soldiers in the Middle East noting that they do not get enough recognition and gratitude for their work. An award could be seen as not being as special anymore due to the amount of awards that are widely available to anyone for anything.

The certificate designed for the Present had to be an award for something that happened today, now and not tomorrow. What do I do everyday that in my eyes could be worthy of an award? After researching into other awards and memorials, nothing seemed to fit around an everyday activity. So the solution was to create an award out of something quite ordinary and mundane, but also something that you are generally proud of. The perfect cup of tea. The award was made up into a certificate, as it is still something that is seen as special, but still isn’t quite as good as receiving a gold medal, therefore the idea of an award is starting to die out.

The Future is based around myself, an award that I would most like to receive in time to come. At this moment in time, the award I would hope to achieve is my degree. The idea of receiving a degree by a joint email with everyone else on the Typographics pathway completely destroys the format of an award and makes it totally impersonal to the receivers.

The process from past through to the future allows the audience to determine the gradual deconstruction and gratification of awards to come in next generations, making them less special and eventually killing out the format of an award completely.