Aurelie Hoegy

Department: Contextual Design

The Border Between Normality and Abnormality

As a designer, an observer and a person I feel it is my responsibility to question society’s prejudices and fallacies about human nature and our individual qualities. I would like us to put ourselves in the realm of the unbalanced, to see and explore the rituals of everyday life from another perspective. Behind the veneer of normality every person has a mysterious side that is waiting to surface. Everyone is full of life, passion and madness, visible or suppressed.

We need this craziness!

We need these moments of alienation, dreams and explosion to survive within society. I believe design can help to liberate, express and bring about these moments, abandoning its norm of disciplining and shaping behaviour; seeking out the ‘fringes of society’ such as madness and alienation.

My design research is aimed at creating tools to push the humdrum reality of daily life towards a more poetic absurdity - inefficient, incongruous and dysfunctional.

I create McGuffins as trigger objects or tools to stimulate situations and behaviours. They are catalysts to experiment with the spontaneous touch
of madness.