My coworking journal: chatting with Pira on how art can create a change
Continuing my week of interviews, on Thursday, March 16, I met with Joriam Philippe of Estudio Pira to discuss his work. This interview too falls under the realm of my coworking experiment during which I am spending six weeks studying different coworkers and coworking spaces and writing about my experiences.
Joriam works from Impact Hub, where I have been based for most of my internship. I had chatted with him a couple of times in the kitchen and at community lunches, but had never known what project he was working on at the Hub. However, when I was perusing Impact Hub’s website, looking for my next interview subject, I found Joriam’s project and was captivated.
Pira is a design studio that works on digital art, media, and games, and their flashy and beautifully-designed website would draw anyone into their artistic landscape. Joriam was generous enough to sit down, have some tea with me, and answer a few of my questions.
Can you describe the overall concept behind Pira and how you got it started?
We are a social innovation agency disguised as a design studio. It started very spontaneously; two friends got together and they liked to paint and were trying to do something together, but then it got more professional so they had this company. Now me, I actually got to Pira years later. It was one of my first jobs and now I’m one of the three owners.
It’s not a regular business story; it started within our friends’ circle and it was about seeing if we could work together and if it could be pleasant.
How do you think art can influence social issues?
We are driven by stories. The economy and the way we live our lives are just stories that we believe. That we love our mothers and should have a job is just a story we’ve been told. It’s been written and rewritten. Many times we produce the same story and many times we defy the story, which is the most important point for social change. Someone has to give you a glimpse of another story so you can change the world around you. Art plays a big role but in a very subtle way. When you compare the brainwashing Isis does to kids to the brainwashing Hollywood does to kids, you can see power of art, but we have power to choose the art we’re influenced by.
Are there any social issues you feel particularly passionate about that you want Pira to address?
My personal issue is education and I’m a big fan of free education.
We don’t have enough free education platforms, especially inclusive education platforms, but we’re on the right path.
If I could choose a single theme to be most important it would be women’s education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Right now I don’t have enough power to reach that issue, but if I could I would create programs to teach people how to teach for free. I’m extremely biased by my privilege, I try my best to get out of it and I know it’s impossible but I try my best.
I enjoyed looking through the portfolio on your website. It seems like you and your partners have a very distinctive, surreal style. Are there any artists or styles of work that have influenced you?
Yes, That Game Company and the CEO Jenova Chen. Also, Andy Gilmore and Hank Green.
What is the meaning and importance of “gamification?”
I’m going to describe it in three tweets: it’s not a technique or a tool, but a point-of-view in which you understand playing as something people do and should do all the time.
The mindstate of playing is a very powerful brain state and should be activated more often in our life. When I think about gamification, it’s not good or bad, it’s inevitable. There was a moment when photography and films affected every single facet of society (for example, security cameras changed our world) and I think we are in this same sort of technological revolution with games. Games are going to change everything and everything is going to start being interactive.
Gamification is a line of thought aiming to turn this wave into a good thing, not to control people but to help them learn better and make their lives happier.
The importance is hard to discuss because it’s inevitable. The importance of studying it is knowing how to do it properly. The importance in society is that it is more proof of evolution and how technology affects our day-to-day life. You’re going to play at work, this will change everything.
How do you think creativity can shape the professional world?
So what is creativity? It’s not a special process, it’s very simple: you grab idea A and idea B in your brain, and they are not at all connected, and you create a connection between them. Many things you do everyday are creative; there isn’t a greater and lesser creativity. Someone created the way we work and learn. For example, in the 18th century, the Prussian government created the things we call classrooms now. They are inspired by military protocols where generals would explain plans to soldiers, and it was linked to the concept of teachers and pupils, and became classrooms. It’s through creativity that this process of learning how to work and behave has been developed and it will continue developing. It’s ludicrous to think that there is change without creativity. You don’t need Steve Job geniuses to create change, everyone does it, we just need to be more conscious of it.
Why did you choose to work out of Impact Hub?
It was also quite natural. We were hired to do a graphic recording here and thought the people were cool and nice, so I showed up without any intentions just to have conversation with the guys. I thought it was a coworking space.
Flo (The Community Host) invited us for coffee and I found out it was more: it’s an international network and what actually happens here was out of our imagination. People are for real; they’re not just talking about it, they’re actually out doing it, and we kind of fell in love. A rented office would drive us mad in four weeks. We were not made for that, we had a far more collaborative and anarchic working space life in Rio, and we were looking for our people somehow. To be honest, this has far more rules than we’re used to. German culture has more rules than Brazilian culture, and it’s a process of adaptation. I think we’re adapting pretty well.
What is your favorite project that you have undertaken so far?
We are developing a game that is a social tool to eliminate small talk from conversations. First of all, it’s very cool to develop a game, and testing the project is far more pleasant than most approval testing. It’s just fun, and it’s interesting to see the tool work. The game is called “Jori.” The game is very simple: there are two piles of cards. One has weird, bizarre questions that no one would ever ask and the other has profound questions. You can create your own rules but the point is, when you ask the same questions everyday, even if they’re good questions, they become boring. But when you present someone with a question they’ve never reflected upon ever, it creates another dialogue space that is very precious and very difficult to achieve because everyone knows the surface stuff about people’s lives from social media like Facebook.
Has your artistic style changed over the course of working on Pira? If yes, how so?
Yeah, I guess your artistic style has to evolve over time. Of course the things that influenced me most were my partners and friends who were with me in Rio. Their ideas and crazy talk influenced me, and changing continents influenced me a lot. I was always trying to grab big media and do something bombastic, but now I’m far more focused on the people around me, and it’s far more pleasant. I’m influenced by creators on youtube; they always say it’s better to have 10 people really interested in you than it is to have 100 people around you who aren’t really interested in you. That was my biggest change in the last few months: looking more around me and to my peers than to a computer screen and to the whole Internet.
Thank you Joriam, I enjoyed chatting with you and learning more about your creative and innovative company!
I came away from this interview considering some things I have not previously considered, such as the importance of playing and the stale nature of smalltalk. Talking with Joriam allowed me to see the world a little differently than I usually do, and for that I am grateful. If you enjoyed this interview, you can read about the start of my experiment here:
I am exploring coworking from my own perspective as a 20-year-old American college student who only learned what coworking is about a month ago. My project is a part of Coworkies, an online platform that connects people between coworking spaces globally (www.coworkies.com ).
