When the work never ends

Introduction and operational notes to the work

I am taking some time to settle the reflections that occurred last month, made possible and accelerated by participation in two very significant conferences, By Design and by Disaster And Future DaysI would like to be able to disseminate a series of central concepts for designers in the current context, especially in Italy, where many things struggle to be translated into English.

In truth, I had written the first draft of the piece starting from my notes, from a series of indications and from Claude (who also remained present in this case for some revisions), but I chose to rewrite everything from scratch precisely to train the muscle of memory and the creation of individual meaning.

I chose to write in Italian even though the lectures were entirely in English and perhaps a large portion of the audience interested in reading it might be English-speaking. I believe there's a huge need to disseminate these topics in Italian, with our own metrics, our own way of thinking, our own long and complicated sentences. I hope that English-speaking audiences can, at least this time, have the page automatically translated by their browser. 🙂 In any case, I absolutely don't deny my linguistic inadequacy in English, but as you can imagine, if I had wanted to have a piece of writing translated, it wouldn't have been a major technical problem these days.

After this long introduction, which will have scared off most interested people, I can begin to delve into the topics.

When we observe the system, we are the system

We're in traffic, we yell, we complain, we get stressed, but we are the traffic: this is the incipit of the speech of Christian BasonYou may have heard it before, but for me, this phrase makes something very concretely clear: when we observe a system, we forget that we are part of it, that we are helping to create it even as we criticize it. For us designers, this is a particularly important point. When we design we are never external and neutral observersWe are within the system we are building. We are the system redesigning itself. And we carry within us much more than we think. We carry within us a history, a way of seeing the world that has been passed down to us by the culture we grew up in, by the people around us, by the studies we have undertaken, and even by our own biology. All of this enters, often without us realizing it, into what we design.

Designers obviously make their own individual ethical and value choices, but they themselves are the point where a whole history of thought and culture is deposited, originating from a specific place. This history, among other things, comes to us from the tools that others have designed before us: every object, every technology, every design we use carries with it the mindset of its creator. For this reason The designer has a double responsibility: to use the tools he has inherited ethically, and to create new ones knowing that they will in turn enter into others, changing them. Many times, during the conferences, it was repeated that first of all we must be good ancestors. Thinking about the environmental and social consequences of what we design, but also the deeper ones that affect the way people think and imagine the world, is now essential.

And this is where another important reflection comes into play, that of Shoukei MatsumotoWhat happens when we start to think our work will never end? Some jobs don't end with the present. It's not about delivering a project, it's about bringing about change in the world, or even just in a small context. To help us understand this, this Buddhist monk invited us to clean for fifteen minutes the space where we would spend the next two days. The cleaning of a space never ends: in those days, we were guests and we took care of that place together, but someone before us had lived there and someone else had cleaned it, and the same will happen after us. It's true for everything. We live on this earth for a certain time, and certain collective changes are so great that even entire lifetimes aren't enough to bring them about. But this shouldn't stop us from doing what we believe is right, because we can leave to those who come after us a world in which the right conditions are ripe to truly change what we, now, are unable to change. Design, when it relates to the environment and society, never ends. And neither does our research: it doesn't arise from nothing and doesn't end with us.

Inhabiting disorientation

If considering ourselves as relationships and not just nodes (using the vocabulary of network science) can shake many of our certainties, it is with the talk of Lisa Baumgarten that we truly begin to lose ourselves, in the good sense, to open ourselves to the new. We bring order to the world through what philosophers call episteme: a kind of emerging, almost always unconscious, underlying lens which in a certain era decides what is important to know and what is not. It's a lens we don't choose, we already have it on us, and it's different from place to place, from time to time.

The point is that these lenses change, and there's no one better than the other. In fact: Allowing different perspectives to coexist, without placing them into value hierarchies, can generate enormous wealth. Of course, it can also generate what Helen Verran He calls it "epistemic disconcertment." It's that sensation, both physical and collective, we experience when we encounter a way of knowing the world completely different from our own, and suddenly begin to doubt categories that seemed obvious, natural, even reality itself, but which we discover are merely one point of view among many. For us designers, making room for ways of knowing far from our own can be a valuable tool: it helps us build new things that truly attempt to look far beyond the present, beyond our subjective, situated, and historicized gaze.

Building alliances beyond what we deem a priority

In practice, this attitude can take very broad forms, through postcolonial and transfeminist perspectives, but it also has very concrete implications on one point: how we choose to build alliances with those who want the same things as us. Manuel Grebenjak It touches on a deeply felt theme for those involved in activism, both professionally and outside of work. In climate action, the concept of emergency (not from a systemic perspective, but from a temporal perspective) is central: Extinction Rebellion has built much of its message precisely on this, because changing global systems that are making the planet increasingly less habitable is a long process, fraught with resistance. But Emergency brings with it impatience, haste, and tension. And this tension often pushes movements to underestimate, or even ignore, the work of those around them. and deep down he would like the same things.
Manuel then proposes a map to understand the different approaches to activism. The areas he identifies are: cultural change, creating alternatives, reform, persuasion, disruption, and organization. They are all facets of the same solid, and only together can they sustain the paradigm shift now necessary for the well-being of most living beings on earth, human and otherwise. Stop belittling the strategies of others: a true alliance is born when we feel like a single entity, at least in purpose, space and time, each with its own specificities, which instead of dividing us can enrich us mutually.

How to govern when the problem is the owner

In the end, we always come back to the same thing: power. This is a theme that emerged in almost all the contributions I've cited, and also in others that, for reasons of time, I can't explore in depth.

We cannot pretend that there is not a system of power underneath all this: a power that is born from status, from the repetition of a certain way of seeing the world, from the resources available, from all those starting advantages that are often described with the image of "wheel of privilege and power“In the last decade, much has been done to challenge things, on a social and environmental level, but the system has responded to all this pressure. There's always a system that responds, that tries to maintain balance and keep everything in its place, simply to survive. The stronger the pressure to change it, the harder its reaction. When we think we can change a huge system like the environmental and social one of the planet, on which we all depend, we should remember one thing: Every strategy, as soon as it starts to work, must be rethought, because it will immediately trigger countermoves ready to neutralize it. The status quo defends itself because it senses that its privileges are changing, but it cannot imagine different futures in which it could still find its place.

And this is where design can come in again: design as a space in which different visions of the future can dialogue. What if…? Sitra organized a very simple but highly effective workshop on this topic. A few videos and a few article clippings were all it took to construct a scenario set in 2038: sixty people immersed in that context simulated an assembly of citizens of the future, in Europe, tasked with proposing rules for the relationship between technology and society. It was an engaging and replicable format, one we could bring to any organization we belong to, sparking new and critical perspectives. I found myself at a table with five other people discussing the social and political issues related to neural communication technologies: I emerged a little shocked, but also much more aware.

Design, in short, as a bridge between different sensibilities, so that everyone can see reality through the eyes of others. Design as a catalyst for collective action. Design that consciously creates the tools that will be part of the redesign of future generations. Bas Van De Poel He opens his speech by saying something simple: If you really want to innovate, you have to start by innovating your organization. AND Imandeep Kaur insists on the same point, on the importance of starting from the local level, taking into account the few resources we have, with democracies that are no longer able to play the role of creating well-being for the people who live there, a vision that reminds me a lot of the libertarian municipalism of Murray Bookchin.

Let's organize ourselves to build future confederates

It's true, here in Italy we operate in a context where the resources to work on these issues are systematically lacking, and it's natural that the market isn't ready to pay those who try to imagine different worlds. But perhaps that's precisely the point. Waiting for the system to recognize us means waiting for the very people who have everything to lose from that change to finance the change. And we have seen that it doesn't work like that: the system responds, defends its parameters, neutralizes.

So all we have to do is organize ourselves. Not as a heroic gesture, but as a daily and patient practice, like good ancestors, thanking those who have worked before us. Clearing the space knowing that someone else will inhabit it after us. Building alliances with those who share our goals, even partially, even when we feel they're going too slowly or too fast. Allowing ourselves to be disoriented by the other, because, as the saying goes, Mark FisherIt is in the strange and the disturbing that the cracks open up through which the new passes.

But Organizing ourselves is something we have to learn to do: it is not a natural instinct, and it is not even something we have been taught, Because until recently, designers only designed what the client decided for them. We must first work on relationships, learn to design our organizations, and create structures, decision-making methods, and ways of circulating information that last over time. But above all, We must learn to plan our goals together, to build them collectively instead of inheriting them ready-made.

The work is never done, and that's okay. Our job isn't to close the project, it's to keep the door open long enough for someone else, one day, to find that solution. momentum That we've missed. In the meantime, there's a lot to do. Let's start with where we are, with who's here.