Covet

Good design is the most persuasive salesman in the room, and nobody can see it working. This grew out of a critical-writing argument that graphic design plays a silent role in driving overconsumption: design doesn't just present products, it manufactures desire for them.

People assume their wants are their own. What goes unexamined is how much of that wanting is engineered by design before anyone consciously decides anything. Rather than write about that mechanism, the project set out to make someone feel it happening to them.

Covet sells canned air, reframed as bottled feelings: three sealed cans, each named after a moment, released in limited numbered editions that climb in price as they shrink in quantity. Scarcity, numbered editions, rising prices, and emotional naming are all stacked onto a product that is provably worthless.

Design-literate hype consumers fluent in drop culture; designers and design students who make persuasion for a living and assume they're immune to it; and the everyday consumer shaped by branding daily without realising it.

• Considered five drops, cut to three for a tighter, more curated set with a deliberate emotional spread.
• Chose minimalism over maximalism once it became clear that restraint is what keeps manipulation invisible.
• The name does double duty: aspirational luxury branding during the campaign, confession at the reveal.
• Marketing runs as a conceptual campaign, where a "request access" button leads to the reveal instead of checkout.

Desire turned out to be far more designable than expected: colour, naming, and scarcity can manufacture real pull around literally nothing. Without a real transaction, the project captures stated desire rather than proven willingness to pay, and the reveal only works once per audience.