HWAWON CHO
Painter / Illustrator / Print Designer
born in South Korea, now based in UK
Cities: 2100
1st Honour - Textile Society Undergraduate Award 2023
New Designers - AVA Award (Top 11 to Watch)
Year: 2022- 2023
“Cities: 2100” is a textile design collection that envisions a futuristic world in the year 2100, inspired by current sustainability trends. Designed for high-density environments like hotel lobbies, it aims to convey an activist message to large audiences. This collection embraces the key elements of planet Earth: nature, humanity, and technology. Through this collection, I explore the significant issues facing our planet and suggest how a new perspective on the relationship between humans, nature, and technology can pave the way to a sustainable future.
In this world, the trees became a totem rather than a resource. All humans gain freedom from false cultures and responses to their philosophy of connectedness to the Earth.
“Creating imaginary worlds with the boldness of ideas breaks us out of the halfway language used to sense and diagnose the crisis.”
Buck (see Young, 2020, p. 57)
By utilising different conceptual designs and techniques throughout the collection, I have embraced different moods in each of my pieces. The four key-word concepts being: ‘Bold’, ‘Symbolic’, ‘Futuristic’ and ‘Romantic’. By selecting themes to integrate in each of my final designs, I am able to take advantage of my passion to convey a narrative via the medium of design.
Through the vast approach of my concept, the intention is to reach no specific target audience, but to instead give an opportunity for all people to have a different way of thinking about the world and to allow them to connect emotionally to the ideas and challenges of our future. By using this collection in an interior design application my intention is to create an absorbing narrative, portraying my activist message, that can dominate an area such as a hotel lobby, window display, a museum or perhaps even the London Underground. All of these areas have high population density and will be visible to large audiences.
Visualisation of Hotel Lobby