Summary of the research poster

The poster analyzes the online art project Scarfolk Council, a fictional English town created by Richard Littler and presented through posters, brochures, warnings, and “official” communications styled like 1970s public information campaigns. The research shows how Scarfolk builds an unsettling, satirical dystopia by looping the 1970s indefinitely and blending nostalgic design with horror, bureaucracy, and political absurdity. Drawing on archival aesthetics, Photoshop collage, and dark humor, Littler creates objects that feel authentic yet disturbing, deliberately blurring the boundary between realism and science fiction .

Methodologically, the authors collect and dissect many Scarfolk artifacts and sort their visual and textual elements into categories (such as children, body parts, animals, domestic objects, medical motifs, politics, or typography). From this material, they derive several recurring “design formulas”:

• 1970s retro aesthetics used as a vehicle for unease,
• horror-film strategies like doubling and repetition,
• familiar objects made uncanny through grotesque alterations,
• a fabricated state aesthetic with logos, official language, and instructions, and
• provocative headline–subline pairings that intensify the images’ impact.

These mechanisms are mapped to broader thematic fields—horror, innocence/guilt, absurdity, realism, violence, surveillance, and illness—showing how small visual or textual shifts transform everyday motifs into sources of anxiety .

In its conclusion, the poster argues that Scarfolk functions as both entertainment and cultural critique. By weaponizing nostalgia and bureaucratic design, the project mirrors contemporary political fears, xenophobia, and media rhetoric while provoking uneasy laughter and self-reflection. The systematic breakdown of Littler’s techniques reveals how a coherent fictional world can emerge from repeated graphic formulas—and how design can mobilize affect, satire, and dread to comment on present-day society .