Gun control via the Cow

When attempting to create a worldwide appealing billboard about an extremely difficult topic in under fifteen minutes, our group was lost in the beginning. How could we make something so controversial seem appealing? Not to mention, what kinds of visual aspect could we use to make it consumable on a global scale?

Our billboard with the rainbow was our attempt at attaining both of these aspects simultaneously, but the result ended up looking a little silly. However, we made some conscious and intentional design choices:

• The use of symbols or images we thought would be at least recognized on a global scale like the earth, rainbow, and trash heap hopefully could be at least identified. Hopefully the global viewers could recognize the make of guns we inserted into the trash heap. If the viewer came from a western context, they might be able recognized some tropes we based the image off of, i.e., the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow, ironic because instead of gold we have worthless trash alongside weapons.
• The words we included, “Kill less people,” were inspired by the American Chick-Fil-A franchise, but our group agreed that correctly translated into other languages, the point of “worldwide gun control” could still be conveyed using these words (although we admittedly do not know every single direct translation of the phrase itself). 
• As our group attempted to make design choices concerning this first billboard, we observed that it seems almost impossible to make something truly global or universal: each person that lives has their own terministic screens, and to some degree interpret external stimuli with a relativist perspective. Is it impossible to achieve a global advertisement, something truly universal? If not, how does one overcome these terministic screens so that we may all interpret specific stimuli in the same view or gaze? 

Our second attempt at a billboard played with this idea, but the outcome turned out increasingly busy, uninterpretable globally, and a little silly. We started out with a version of another Chick-Fil-A billboard. With the realization that this specifically catered to western audiences, we thought about how other cultures might interpret cows painting billboards: probably not well. In many cultures, cows are symbols of religious importance, which is why you see the religious “presence” in the background. The peace symbol with the country flags was another attempted to globalize this image, but it didn’t flow well with the rest of the billboard and also could maybe be unrecognizable to individuals unfamiliar with different country flags.

Overall, we thought about questions of globalization vs. relativism. How can we mediate these two things in a way that is most successful and beneficial?