1x7 — Alvise Mattozzi: The Social in design and the design of Social

Into the rigid cultural separation we are used to, in terms of disciplines, knowledge, and most generally, approaches and practices, there is a pretty messy place to design. Design has an inevitable economic and social impact indeed: it reaches to move the artificial and the spiritual at the same time. While it removes real problems, it interprets and produces other new ones. Its multicoloured nature lay onto a wide range of matters, a few crucial, such as designer’s and user’s logics. In respect of that issue rises this 7th conversation with Alvise Mattozzi, whose research — characterized by semiotics and sociology, a precious tradition that originated in Italy — reaches from design and technology studies up to the use and circulation of images within both pop and scientific cultures. Professor Mattozzi uses semiotics as a descriptive method within his research. He always has taught in design schools. In the last ten years, he worked next to Professor Kris Krois at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen, with whom they founded the Master of Arts in Eco-Social Design, a practice-based course which integrates social sciences and design. Since 2018, Professor Mattozzi is also committed to the Science and Technology Studies course at the Politecnico di Torino. As other thinkers proposed by the DT — Conversations column, he is a torchbearer of humanities. As usual, his answers were recorded and synthesized by myself. Enjoy!

1 — Let us start with an engaging question about design nature as a practice that realises our theories’ habitus. According to your studies, to what extent has that process been unveiled and codified today? Do you think it is possible to “scientify” such a socio-cultural fact?

“I think design is social, like other things related to human beings. I also believe design is strictly related to artefacts, both in the design process and its outcomes, regardless of whether they are products or services. So, according to my viewpoint, the issue is to widen our conception of “social”, including artefacts as actual social actors. This is because it is key to teach designers social research methods able to take into account artefacts, like, for instance, ethnography, as we do in our courses in Bozen. Moreover, we must consider that today there are several ethnographic studies highlighting the role artefacts played even within designing processes. One starts with a post-it to arrive at complex and different artefacts, such as mockups, maps and prototypes. Several types of research from anthropology and sociology reveal that design processes are distributed among a series of people and artefacts. Therefore, the social conception of design emerging from social sciences differs from other approaches that see design more as a cognitive activity. For example, the popular notion of design thinking focuses on the designer mindset. Thus, I think a thorough comprehension of innovation deserves a greater framework beyond the individual designer’s mind. Such a framework could also be used to clarify the difference between design and, for instance, crafts(wo)manship. I think the such difference is especially relevant today to the various trends of makers or digital craftsmen. It is clear that there are points of contact and overlapping between crafts(wo)men and designers and that it may result useless in establishing sharp boundaries. Still, the point is the role of “designing”, actually “drawing”, or representing the design project through various successive artefacts that are key for design. For example, a wicker weaver or a carpenter, given their intrinsic knowledge of the matter, produce drawings, but they could easily start to work on the twine or with the axes. However, a design drawing is a complex model — even because it is never isolated but rather is always next to other design artefacts — constituted by semantic dimensions that allow the developing of a distributed reasoning among several actors. It can coordinate several points of view indeed — from designers and clients to executors and stakeholders, up to wider audiences. Therefore, design throughout all the artefacts put into play conjures up an organisational model that is really different from craftsmanship. Thus, it is clear that one can even do scientific studies of design processes as a social form of organisation, immersed in design artefacts, as sociology is trying to do. But another thing is to think of a unique method representing how those processes are conducted. The design environment is so rich that the process changes from culture to culture, from organisation to organisation.”

2 — Now, we go deep and consider semiotics. The science of signs and symbols that tie us to information. Considering your experience, how much the design culture has integrated semiotic approaches? And what is today’s potential for semiotics in design?

“It is true. Considering its main schools of thought, semiotics was born as a science of signs and symbols. Still, its ability, which is more “operative” — a crucial issue for dialoguing with design — has risen to go over the sign dimension. Already Saussure, one of the founders of modern semiotics, used to say that an isolated sign has no relevance and that it is necessary to always study a sign within a system of signs. So semiotics has become a potential design asset when it has focused on signs configurations rather than isolated signs, and thus on the relationships among them and the relationships which make them. A systemic approach, wider and more articulated. Hence, semiotics, within the design process, could be useful concerning the analysis of configurations: material configurations of textures, consistencies, shapes and colours, graphic configurations of grids, and websites configurations, made of several windows, but it also allows to analyse movements configurations that emerge within an interaction. Semiotics, through such analysis, allows identifying how configurations differ among them and how they produce specific sense effects, thanks to particular attention to the interaction between signs and configuration itself. Semiotics, as semiotic of configurations, could be used as analytical methods in the design process concerning artefacts or experiences. As such, it has a peculiar functioning and productivity that is nowadays really sought-after in France, as well, to a slightly lower extent, in Italy and is now also growing in the Anglo-Saxon world. So, considering semiotics as a method for analysing configurations allows us to recover the whole terminological and categorical tradition and extend it into the system of social interactions. But to think in terms of configurations, or systems of relationships, is not for sure a unique feature of semiotics. Such a conception has great importance in the history of design, and it explicitly thrived with the contribution of Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. And it is precisely from this common ground of configurations that semiotics could be used and could discover a wider development.”

3 — Continuing to investigate the disciplinary field and considering the time we live by, what other studies do you account as fundamental for comprehending reality? And regarding design, what ones do you feel to suggest?

“That issue, from my viewpoint as a teacher and researcher, is critical. Given that, especially in Italy, there is a lack of dialogue between design and social sciences. Today indeed, as I was explaining, social sciences, thanks to an extension of the notions of “social” and “society” proposed by some approaches like Actor-Network Theory, could offer a lot to design — and vice versa. Unfortunately, social sciences have been considered up to now very little — again, especially in Italy. And this is quite a paradox because design, throughout its history, has always been concerned with social issues. And designers have considered themselves social mediators. Design culture has always been committed to promoting some social interactions and preventing others. The difficulty of design and social science speaking to each other could be explained through the indifference that social sciences have demonstrated towards artefacts for a long time. For a long time, social sciences have had an idea of ​a society which could work for a group of baboons, which exchange gazes, gestures and bodily interactions, nearly without artefacts, as Bruno Latour provocatively highlighted some years ago. Therefore, a paradox emerges on the disciplinary and educational dimension: design as social practice, oriented to social issues, without any actual interaction with the social sciences. But today, in Northern Europe, at least, such a paradox is going to be overcome. We see, for instance, that a “design anthropology” is establishing itself via the more and more intense use of ethnography, the classic research method of anthropology, within projects. Moreover, different research projects today see close collaboration between designers and sociologists. In Italy, the such dialogue goes slowly, and we see the difficulty in introducing social sciences disciplines within design schools. Here in Bozen, we successfully introduced the Master’s degree in Eco-social Design, where design and social sciences dialogue around and from the design projects students are involved in. I remember that in 2007 AIGA published a little pamphlet called “An ethnography primer” to inform its associates on the usage of social research methods. Therefore, I hope that also in Italy, we start to take such issues seriously, as today occurs at the Goldsmith College of London University or at the Aalto University in Finland or in Denmark. Schools which care for and foster the application of social research methods within the design practices.”

4 — Now, let us go to the open field of cognitive sciences. Considering innovation and its intrinsic change of pattern on the individual level, what does the “social” exchange, especially with behaviour and situation?

“My education and training, which makes me really fond of social sciences, make me adopt a more critical stance concerning cognitive ones — another academic field, extensive, rich and variegated. And that could be even similar to social sciences, to a certain extent. But that is mostly focused on the individual. Being a sociologist, I do not see people as isolated individuals. Such a view is also grounded on considering the “configurations” and the aforementioned “relations”. That is why I see cognition as a result of social relations. Thus I always conceived it as a “distributed” cognition among human bodies and artefacts which are “between” and “around” human bodies. I try to go deeper because here, we have lexical and semantic issues; you are right to consider the behavioural side underpinning the cognitive approach. But as a sociologist, I suggest — again — enlarging the reflection and stretching the term “behaviour” with “action” and “practice”, as occurred in sociology from Weber onwards, at least. And here we have an author who connected those themes to design, Elizabeth Shove. She has studied thoroughly how adding novelties within everyday practices allows changing determined action patterns. Shove also highlights how values change given new artefacts. These social issues today represent one of the most important challenges we ought to respond to if we think, for instance, in terms of sustainability. That is a really open field of research to which different schools of thought, from “nudge theory” to “behaviour change”, contribute. I think practice theory’s contribution is key in this field because our capacity to change and figure out new patterns depends on our daily configurations and how certain new artefacts allow reframing. If one addresses such issues by that viewpoint, one cannot overlook the study of practices, especially if those are carried out or experienced by users or designers.”

5 — Ok, we can now conclude with culture, considered as the entirety of human creations, both “conceptual” and “physical”. In your view, what sense did we make of our culture and its consumption? What can be to you the “homo” of the future?

Well, still, that question is crucial. In the social sciences, especially in anthropology, the notion of culture has clearly played a fundamental role, even if today is widely questioned and surrounded by critiques. Here is not the place where to deepen that debate. Instead, I would really stretch our dialogue on the consumption issue, in which I am directly involved as a teacher and researcher. Within this field, I suggest the recovery and the development of “domestication” studies. The “domestication theory” was born as a theory of media consumption around the ’80s in Britain, focusing on how media consumption would change with the entry of new technologies, which generated new media ecologies within the domestic environment. So, from these studies, it emerged that once people have come into possession of new technologies — and artefacts in general — they make them their own, adapting them to their environments and practices. In other words, those objects of some sort are alienable from the organizations and brands that produce them. However, concerning that substantial appropriation, which also happens on the legal level, today we are in the presence of a remarkable change within the consumption model: today, indeed, on the one hand, we are more and more tied to the manufacturing organization, thanks also to the services that they deliver; on the other, especially with digital goods, a full-appropriation does not take place anymore, because we use them through a temporary license at last. E-books are an example of that, their codes are always the producer’s property, and we cannot do anything with them. If the service also closes, the products you bought are gone. Hence, reflecting on it, we could say today we are witnessing a decrease in that consumption model that characterized a specific economic model and played a key role in constructing our everyday life and identities. We are witnessing a new relationship ecology indeed. And that will imply a reframing of what good is, of consumption itself, up to establishing new boundaries of “property”. With this in mind, a series of bonds are created to which we must give a social and community answer to avoid going towards a series of dangerous medieval bonds of subjugation.”