Making the Novelty Myth Sayable: Language, Power, and the Conditions of Design Practice

This contribution presents Unagency, a parafictional design agency, created within PhD studies at Vilnius Academy of Arts and used as a practice-based artistic research framework. It investigates the myth of novelty in contemporary graphic design culture. Within commercial design environments, innovation, speed, progress and constant renewal are framed as unquestionable values; whereas doubt, slowness, hesitation, and other less productive states become difficult to articulate from professional discourse, thus remains largely invisible, even to those experiencing it.
Unagency operates through a parafictional institutional frame that imitates the language, structures, and procedural formats of commercial design agencies: briefs, deadlines, reports, and productivity rituals, while consciously deforming them. They are transformed to un-brief (assignment without requiring a resolution), un-deliverable (insight without outcome) among the others, for the purpose of un-mything (unravelling of progress and innovation narratives), and function as interventions enabling critical gaze of how novelty imperatives organise everyday design work and produce the belief that novelty equals value, and designers can be agents of change even when structural conditions limit meaningful transformation.
Methodologically, the project combines parafictional institutional modelling, hermeneutic-critical design analysis, and reflexive auto-ethnography grounded in long-term professional experience within creative advertising and communication agencies, as well as technology companies. Through different experiments Unagency investigates forms of design experience that have become increasingly unsayable. By attending to doubt, slowness, hesitation, fear of failure, withholding or hoarding of ideas it looks for space for thinking and working modes that resist acceleration, optimisation, and narrative simplification within contemporary creative economies.