KAYON — A Connecting Door
Let’s travel in time and put ourselves in an ancient javanese puppet performance called Wayang Kulit. You can YouTube it anyway 4:25–4:35. What you see in the screen was “Gunungan” which represents universe. Gunungan is performed to connect one chapter to another. On the other hand, Bali has similar Gunungan concept within their puppet performances, it was called “Kayon” with same function. Watch it here at 2:54–3:08.
The assignment was to create promotional material which will be used for Kopernik’s 9th Birthday Event in Ubud, Bali. There was no specific brief whatsoever. So, me and the communications team started to brainstorm, what items that would be shown in the promotional material itself. We came up with the idea that “this should be local” and “represent Kopernik’s activities”. It was like eureka moment when we all agreed to use the concept of Kayon.
The local concept easily fit in the Kayon itself as representative of local culture in Bali. Our further observation shown that Kayon was depicting the balanced nature. So we assume, the message which would have delivered by the Kayon was “Let’s take care of this beauty and balanced mother nature”. Even there are few parts of nature that we can still enjoy, mother nature facing a lot of challenges nowadays. There are whole bunch of critical issues that need to be addressed such as pollution, plastic waste, uncontrolled industrial development, and damaged environment. We are including those conditions onto the Kayon concept, so surely the message would be “We are not taking care of mother nature well, then we need to action now”. These message would be a perfect fit for Kopernik’s activities.
Kopernik was well known as an organization that help distributes affordable clean energy technologies to remote area in Indonesia to reduce poverty. But then few years back, they started to focus on experimentations to reduce poverty in the last mile. We agreed that these are two separate episodes with it’s own stories. Kayon, as I mentioned earlier, was used to open a chapter and connects to another one. In this case, Kayon which made for Kopernik’s birthday event could be the connecting door from the previous chapter to the current one.
Since the main concept of promotional material was finally approved and finished, then we started to implement The Kayon itself into several items such as digital posters, printed big banner, backdrop for stages and of course t-shirts.
Based on this experience, I thought that the key to avoid stuck on creating idea without clear brief was to compile all necessary items before mixing them. I obviously wouldn’t be able to do this alone without another brains to brainstorm. So, thanks to communications team for this beautiful work.
Maybe you might want to see how this design and I perform on the same stage, watch here. ;)
Later, on the next post, I will show you another illustrations which made for Kopernik’s annual t-shirts that will represents Kopernik’s new focus — experimentations.
Thank you for reading this post.
