This work is about making sense of the world through images and words. I use the circle—a simple, balanced shape—as my main tool for creating visuals. Alongside writing, this method helps me question the way the world is shown to us and explore how design can tell different stories. As Rachel Gannon and Mireille Fauchon explain, illustrators often find meaning by noticing patterns—repeated images, phrases, or ideas. Texts, like the systems they reflect, are full of gaps. The illustrator’s role is to fill these gaps—not just with images, but with thought and care (Gannon & Fauchon, 2021). Life is also full of gaps—missing knowledge, broken logic, things we avoid seeing. As a designer, I don’t try to cover these up. Instead, I look at them closely, ask questions, and imagine new ways of understanding them.
Everything is connected—our thoughts, our choices, nature, and each other. These systems were meant to support life. But today, they often lead to destruction, control, and loss. Land and animals are treated as things to take and use, instead of relationships to respect and care for. What we need now is not more power, but more cooperation—with one another, and with the Earth.
We’re living in a time when our habits and unconscious choices shape how we treat the planet. A consumer culture tells us to want more, faster, while forgetting our shared responsibility to others, to the future, and to the natural world.
This project is a call to slow down. To reconnect.
1. Thoughts
Thoughts
Everything we do, starts with a thought. It is what your mind says, shows, or works on. A passing idea. How to make sense of the world, solve problems, and reflect on oneself and others.
Strong Belief
A solid idea that’s rooted deep inside you. Emotionally anchored thought about what is true, right, or important.
Closed-minded
Refuses new ideas or perspectives. Rigid beliefs that feel untouchable.
Assumption
Something you accept as true without proof or deep questioning — often without knowing where it came from.
Preconceived Belief
Inherited or socially absorbed from othes; unexamined
Questioning
Actively wondering, emotionally and intellectually open
Skepticism
Doubting or partially rejecting; holding it at a distance
Mind
The mind is where your thoughts and feelings live — it’s how you know, choose, remember, dream, and respond.
2. Interactions
Interactions
When two or more things or thoughts affect or respond to each other.
Perspective
Your angle, how something looks to you, the way you see. Shaped by your experiences, beliefs, emotions, and position in the world.
Communication
Sending and receiving thoughts, feelings, or information
Conflict
State of tension, struggle, or incompatibility between people, groups, ideas, or forces — where their needs, goals, values, or emotions collide and cannot exist together
Cognitive Dissonance
When a person experiences psychological discomfort due to a conflict between their actions, beliefs, values, or thoughts.
Defence
Protective response — emotional, psychological, or physical — used to guard against threat, pain, or vulnerability.
Derogation
Lowering someone or something’s worth, devalue — in words, tone, or judgment.
Disavowal
Rejecting connection to, or refusing to acknowledge someone or something.
Control
Gaining power by manipulating, isolating, or limiting another
Destruction
When something is torn apart, broken, or made to disappear — sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once
Changing
Thoughts, emotions, beliefs evolve. Happens slowly, like learning or aging
Reaching Out
When you try to connect with someone or something that feels separate — emotionally, physically, or relationally
Communication
Sending and receiving thoughts, feelings, or information
Connection
The experience of being linked, related, or in meaningful contact with someone or something, emotionally, physically, or mentally.
3. Coexist
Coexist
Living side by side respectfully.
Coexistence
Living or existing together in shared space or time, even when there are differences in values, beliefs, identities, or needs. Not erasing or dominating each other
Sharing
Where all sides gain something of value — fairly, respectfully, and without harm. It’s built on balance, reciprocity, and shared well-being.
Greed
Selfish desire to have or take more than is needed, especially when it comes to wealth, power, resources, or control — and usually at the expense of others or the system around you. Wanting more and more, even when it hurts others or the environment.
Extractivism
The mindset and system where value is taken from people, land, animals, and ecosystems — without giving back, without limits and consent.
Collaboration
Working together with intention to reach a goal or maintain harmony.
Cooperation
When different parts, whether people, groups, or systems work together toward a shared goal. It’s based on mutual benefit, trust, and communication.
4. Ecosystem
Ecosystem
Everything alive and non-alive interacting and cooperating together in a shared environment — all influencing and depending on one another.
Healthy Ecosystem / Earth for 4.5 billion years
A place where everything, plants, animals, water, and air — works together and stays in balance and harmony. No species dominates or collapses the system. Diversity creates stability, allowing the system to recover from shocks.
Anthropocene
Is the age where humans changed the Earth more than any natural force. Not gently, but with deep and lasting impact. Unlike previous natural changes in Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history, the Anthropocene represents a loss driven by one species: humans.
We have caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and around half of all plants.
(Carrington, 2018)
Nearly half of all habitable land on Earth is now devoted to agriculture, and most of that to feed livestock, not people.
(Ritchie & Roser, 2024)
Reference
Bland, A., 2012. Is the Livestock Industry Destroying the Planet?. Smithsonian Magazine, [online] 1 August. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/is-the-livestock-industry-destroying-the-planet-113579136/ [Accessed 2 August 2019].
Carrington, D., 2018. Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study. The Guardian, [online] 21 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study [Accessed 23 May 2018].
Gannon, R. and Fauchon, M. (2021) Illustration Research Methods. Bristol: Intellect Books.
McGrath, M., 2019. Nature crisis: Humans ‘threaten 1m species with extinction’. BBC News, [online] 6 May. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48169783 [Accessed 1 July 2019].
Poore, J. and Nemecek, T., 2018. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), pp.987–992. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [Accessed 22 May 2025].
Ritchie, H. and Roser, M., 2024. Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Our World in Data. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [Accessed 23 February 2025].