Jenny Tin

Jenny Tin

Speculative New China, 2018

Jenny Tin is a Hong Kong-based designer with a focus on creating provocative and conceptual works through the exploration of imagery and typography. She believes that design can engage with a broader social context and promote positive change by constructing a compelling narrative.

By 2020, China will implement a nationwide credit rating system that will monitor and measure its 1.4 billion citizens’ level of ‘trustworthiness’. With the use of advanced surveillance and data-gathering systems, the social credit system will exert total control and transform China in a new age of surveillance. 

Speculative New China is a critical examination of graphic design in the political activism of China’s human rights and mass surveillance issues concerning the social credit system.

The project is the visualisation of the future scenarios, where China embraces IT-backed authoritarianism, which celebrates advanced technology that controls and shapes the behaviour of society. The graphic design objects present two conflicting narratives: the authority and the resistance.

Through a speculative approach, this project contributes to the discussion about the pervasiveness of technology, facilitating a more desirable future by critiquing the current practice. Design fiction serves as a creative process by provoking imagination on the potential implication of the disruptive system and putting the value of privacy into perspective.

Image: Jenny Tin, Speculative New China Manual Posters, 2018. A variety of papers and polyester. Photo courtesy of the artist.