BURNOUT Process
Burnout
This project will investigate the burnout culture of corporate workers, partly based on my own experience of working in an office. It feels as if we live in a world of competitive tiredness, long hours and the normalization of never switching off. This research will feed into wearables that will represent the weight of industriousness as well as an ultimate release from it.
The topic will be explored through a number of questions. Some of these relate to the workers themselves and their self-perception. How do they manage the constraints of their job? How do they behave outside of work and what does a holiday mean to them?
Other questions revolve around how I visualize these workers. How can I represent mental exhaustion through objects or garments? What does the body look like when exhausted or running out of time? What does it mean to wear tiredness on the skin? And more broadly, when we spend most of our time indoors bathed in artificial light, how do we attempt to reconstitute our relationship with nature?
Through these explorations, I aim to ultimately portray a worker emancipated, perhaps with their dreams embodied rather than the weight of work.