The purpose of this project was to produce a detailed proposal for a designed object or experience that serves to reveal what is concealed in our society, provoking dialogue or consideration aiming toward change. The problem I am highlighting is that the pharmaceutical industry seems to have a pill for everything that ails us. We have drugs for things like sadness because we need people to be able to continue working no matter what life throws at us. In a capitalist society, profits seem to be more important than people. Under a more humane system, people would be given time to heal and be sad when faced with difficulties. This project was inspired by the book The Loss of Sadness by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield. This book highlights “that contemporary psychiatry confuses normal sadness with a depressive mental disorder because it ignores the relationship of symptoms to the context in which they emerge…this assumption allows normal responses to stressors to be mischaracterized as symptoms of disorder.” (page 8). With this in mind, I began to question how pharmaceuticals play a role in society. I created a line of hypothetical pharmaceutical drugs that are meant to fix certain stressors that may be confused as disorders. I narrowed it down to three different stressors: grief, unfulfillment, and oppression. I used color psychology when deciding the final color palette: I used purple for the drug Mourfuleptin. Purple can be associated with mourning. Yellow was used for Noharmonioum as yellow is used to symbolize jealousy and deceit. I chose green for Unfulfilledazon as green can represent a lack of experience, envy, and misfortune.
