J. Jackson Design

In the coming days and weeks, you will see this site be transformed into thegoodexchange.com.

The good exchange is my MFA graphic design thesis project and it will be consuming the next year and a half of my life. I am very excited to roll up my sleeves an get into this project, as I feel it has great potential to provide something unique to the field of visual communication. Furthermore, I am very excited to do something truly meaningful and lasting through design.

For all those curious, here is the project rundown:

The focus of the good exchange is to create a dialog built upon questions that probe the topics of good, morality, ethics, and how it all relates to visual culture.

The purpose of the discussion is to gain a better understanding of how visual communicators might more effectively persuade people to do good.

By exchanging experiences and ideas, conducting field research, and completing meaningful case studies, the good exchange will ultimately uncover ways visual communicators can achieve greater success in empowering their audiences to do good.

More to follow. Get ready to exchange.

As I dig deeper into my research, it’s becoming quite clear that one cannot really define morality in any sort of a concise way. In fact, as I’ve been reading Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality, and Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, the differences in opinions of what morality actually is only becomes more evident.

As it relates to my project, I have decided not to get bogged down with generating a rigid definition of what morality actually is. You might see this as a cop out, but I don’t think so. Morality means many things to so many different groups of people. What is the point of exerting an enormous amount of effort trying to define a term that few people will agree on? Frankly, it’s counter-productive.

To create level playing field, I plan to consider morality (as it relates to my topic) as our sense of responsibility that we have towards one another. Yes, it’s a simplistic description I know, but it’s one that will likely serve the purpose of my project well. Rather than generating lofty goals for developing a catch-all definition, it is instead my aim to find how designers can more efficiently engage a viewer’s sense of morality — to use this sense of responsibility or obligation to get people to act.