This study explores how two mega-crises – the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war – are portrayed in photographic performances of resilience in crowdfunding campaign calls of small companies. These companies, aside from being commercial actors, are organizations consisting of individual crisis experiencers and eyewitnesses. The authors examine 234 photographic visuals (168 photographs, 43 photo collages, 21 GIFs and 2 GIF collages) in 53 crisis-related crowdfunding campaign calls (19 Finnish, 18 North American, and 16 Ukrainian) on three different platforms. The data are analysed with a focus on visual rhetoric. The study contributes to previous visual analyses by finding five visually performed connotations of resilience: suffering, endurance, resistance, peer support and hope. The article concludes that, in the era of mega-crises, crowdfunding has become a merged discursive site for both promotional and testimonial performances, varying from a private to communal focus and thereby involving both business-related and societal functions.
The study presents a corpus-based analysis of the role of music and non-verbal sound in multimodal metaphors in iPhone commercials (2016–2025). In a corpus of 100 commercials, 15 metaphorical ads were identified for detailed analysis. Combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory with social-semiotic sound studies and Aristotelian rhetoric, the study develops a functional approach for classifying and interpreting sonic material. The analysis shows that music and non-verbal sound can contribute to metaphor construction by cueing source and target domains or by specifying mappable features. Their contribution is shaped by properties specific to sonic material, especially its affective, temporal and immersive dimensions. The findings suggest that music and non-verbal sound are crucial to metaphor design and integral to the cognitive and rhetorical force of iPhone’s deliberately verbal-claim-minimalist advertising.
‘In the current context of global crisis’, Bonnin writes, ‘we have the opportunity to design a research agenda for an uncertain future from a dark present. But there is no reason why that agenda should also be uncertain and dark’. My article takes up this challenge by exploring the visuality of hope. Drawing on the community pantry movement that sprouted across the Philippines during the pandemic, I examine the online representations of these pantries and the ways they mediate and circulate hopeful imaginaries amid the crisis. Using a chronotopic approach, I trace how such visual practices creatively mobilise different spatiotemporalities, thereby suturing the past, present and future, and in effect, registering alternative lifeworlds in the face of systemic collapse. This article contributes to hope studies by rendering visible the visual materiality of hope.
This article argues that as digitalisation and artificial intelligence become increasingly embedded in design practice, the preservation of cultural memory is shifting from physical spaces to digital environments structured by data and algorithms. While these technological transformations open up new possibilities for design methods and the transmission of cultural memory, they also introduce challenges: algorithm-driven rationality risks reducing the depth of human emotions and homogenising diverse cultural memories. Drawing on the theory of Archives of Feelings and visual culture studies, and adopting the concept of historical empathy proposed as a framework, this study analyses three key dimensions of cultural memory as mediated through visual design: social collective memory, marginalised group memory and human–AI collaborative memory. It further explores how visual design can negotiate between technological rationality and humanistic care, ensuring that Digital Archives of Feelings sustain diverse cultural memories while preserving emotional depth.
