Burnout is an epidemic that has been affecting the creative industry for many years.
Categorized by its great toll on a person’s mental and physical health, it affects a creatives ability to work greatly, most commonly resulting in time off from work or even people leaving the line of work. It’s Nice That’s article “The pandemic became a catalyst for creative burnout. So how do we move forward?” states that: 57% of readers' workload increased during the pandemic, 75% noted they worked overtime, 74% did not receive extra payment for documented overtime. (Kim, H. (2022)
The cause of burnout is rather quite simple, stress, which is widely heard about within the field of design. With short time crunches and constant workflow, creatives find themselves pulling all-nighters at the studio and over-working themselves to purely keep up. This has aided Burnout culture and led to competitive stances in the industry on matters like overworking being a rite of passage for young designers and all-nighters being worn as a badge of honour.
Dis_Connect aims to put a stop to this. By reinforcing work hours back into the creative industry, through an intrusive guerrilla campaign, taking over public spaces and creative websites. In doing so creatives stress levels will lower and they can finally develop a healthy work-life balance, minimizing the chance of developing burnout. We plan to do so by petitioning for a ‘Right to Disconnect’ law to be passed within the UK just like the one passed within Portugal (put into place in Jan 2022). This law will prevent employers from contacting their employees outside of working hours. Help reset the malware and disconnect.
Visit the Dis_connect website here: Dis_connect
