Exhibition Design / Book Design / Copywriting / Illustration / Product Design

Reconnecting Fantasy and Reality

“Saving one animal may not change the world, but for that one animal, the world will change forever.”

Bædtme Stories, a project in lieu of thesis, is a children’s book series using a visual storytelling method to explore ethical issues raised by the relationships that humans have with other animals. By inverting perspectives, the project experiments with ways to resolve the cultural disconnection between two views of the animal worlds—the idyllic little kid’s dreamland and the messy, fragile ecosystem of the real world.

Through the form of three interactive, illustrated books, the project encourages people to reconsider their relationship with animals and potentially evoke compassion, respect, and care for animals.

The “Happy” Elephant Home

Like most kids, I always fond of visiting zoos and reading all kinds of animal stories. In zoos, I got to see, to hear, and to touch my animal friends. And through those stories, I got to learn their lives. In my eyes as a child, they were living in a dreamlike world—a world without pain— where they certainly enjoy their lives. I kept holding that idea for a long time and never doubted it until last summer I had a trip to Thailand.

I happened to visit an elephant camp called Happy Elephant Home. It is a place where they claim themselves as an elephant sanctuary which helps mistreated elephants recover and live a normal life. Through my own experience and other people’s voices I learned, the owner was not telling the truth. He is not only owning multiple elephant camps including the crude ones but also, he let the mahouts (elephant trainer) abuse elephants. So on one side, the elephants seem living a happy life, on the other side—which is the side you wouldn’t be able to see directly—they were actually living a miserable life. 

Reviews from TripAdvisor.com on the Happy Elephant Home

The disturbing truth made me doubt my longtime belief. Am I blinded by those childhood memories? Maybe I never outgrow the imaginary animal kingdom? What’s the real world out there? What about those animals living in zoos? Do they really enjoy their lives? I got panicked.

I started to question myself:

What’s our relationship with animals? 

Human-Animal Relationship

When we talk about the human-animal relationship one thing that we couldn’t avoid would be animal ethics. In the book Ethics and Animals Lori Gruen lists the animal ethics into four different categories:

The red words highlighted the problems that animals are facing right now. Billions of animals are killed for consumption each year; at least 115.3 million animals are used in research and an estimated 100,000-200,000 of these are primates (Taylor, et al. & Carlsson, et al.); and if you haven’t noticed already, we are in the midst of the sixth “mass extinction” in the earth’s history—an extinction that human activity is the cause. By the end of the century half of the nine million species could be gone.

But why there are many of us are not aware those problems? What stopped us from knowing the truth?

How to evoke awareness in people to let them reconsider their relationship with animals?

Cultural Disconnection

In the book Wild Ones Mooallem shares a concept called shifting baselines syndrome:

It’s not just that we start our lives unaware of the damage that preceded us, but that we end them burdened with having witnessed so much damage done (145).

Psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. has termed this phenomenon Environmental Generational Amnesia—our tendency to adopt the natural world we come to know in childhood as our psychological baseline against which we measure all change and which defines our expectation of how the world should be.

Fantasy VS. Reality

There is research on children’s books: researchers pulling a random sample of one hundred recent children’s books and found only eleven that did not have animals in them. Among those eleven, animals have almost nothing to do with natural at all, but are arbitrary stand-ins for people.

That’s why there is a disconnection between the two worlds. On one hand, there is the idyllic little kid’s dreamland, and on the other hand, is the messy, fragile ecosystem of the real world.
My question became to:

How to connect the two worlds and show kids the other side of the story?

Design Brief

Main Question

How to evoke awareness in people to let them reconsider their relationship with animals?

Audience

Primary audience: children aged five to twelve. Five to twelve is the elementary school age where children begin to understand cause and effect relationships, and they are learning that their behaviors have consequences that affect others.

Secondary audience: parents and adults who still perceive the world from the natural world around them from their own childhood. As adults, they could help kids understand and accept the other side of the story and in the meantime, they can also learn the truth they might not know.

Objective

My goal is to connect the two worlds that animals live in—the imaginary world in the little kid’s dreamland and the messy, fragile real world. I want to explore how to use visual storytelling method to impact people, to help them understand the other side of the story.

Concept: Subversive Storytelling

I want my project to tell stories. Not stories that attribute human traits to animals but the ones that can capture the perspectives of animals themselves. In the meantime, I like being a subversive storyteller. Bury the disturbing truth underneath a harmless surface. And in the end, surprise people with the reality that for which they weren’t prepared.
The project name Bædtime Stories opens up two interpretations: Bedtime Stories implies its fairytale origin; Badtime Stories reveals the stories are not that innocent as one would expect. In response to the project name, the three books also have their hidden meanings. From the books’ structure (accordion fold with nonadhesive covers), their childlike imagery styles, and the books’ names one can hardly tell there is any difference from regular children’s storybooks. But when you take a close look, you will find the stories are not that pleasant.

Bædtime Stories & The Exhibition