Designreports have a tradition at the Design Department of the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Germany and its Research Group for design, the »labor visuell«. They are part of a bigger agenda to collect global information about cross-country differences in design and visual language itself.

This year, we contributed a report about Sri Lanka to the »labor visuell«.
For that we collected the necessary information through interviews and by documenting the work of designers, artists, photographers, illustrators and architects. Between February and March 2012, we spent one month in Sri Lanka, and got in touch with some of the main creatives of the country
to collect the aforementioned material in form of interviews, pictures and film.

The focus of the project is on the origins and the current nature of Sri Lanka‘s creative environment. Our interests include identifying the main contributors as well as their techniques and motivations. As a result we created a book which illustrates the history and the current situation of the
visual diversity in Sri Lanka.

27 interviews with artists, designers, architects, illustrators and photographers and 8 various series with photographs of Sri Lanka in a book with about 700 pages, printed on 3 different kinds of paper plus a slipcase made of tropical wood.

— in progress Read Less