How #nevicata14 and Marx forever changed my understanding of design profession
Or “why designers shouldn’t (just) solve the problems, but also freeze their asses watching their work being dismantled”
16th of November was an amazing day in Piazza Castello, Milan, where I spent hours watching how the temporary urban installation for which I’ve been working since July 2014 was being dismantled piece by piece.
I remembered how construction phase took weeks and lots of members of design team were present during that time observing the process and sharing experience. Now I was just the only designer documenting workers and machines. People who heard about it were considering it as a kind of sad thing happening. And it really was during the first hour after which I started feeling just blessed and this post is to explain why.
To put it very simple — I just realize how (unfortunately) rare it happens that designers can see all the life of their project from the ideation moment, through implementation and real use till the very end, and how much everyone loses because of it.
#nevicata14 was a very challenging project (I bet not just for me personally). Since its start I participated in the first ideation phase, in definition of concept and designing all its storytelling, in design of participative process engaging citizens to contribute, in all the social media strategy definition and management, graphic and communication design which was as transmedial as it can get in case of the public square: physically present in the environment, printed on various supports, digitally implemented in the website and socials, I even designed the construction site poster so it was following all the identity guidelines, then we designed all the system of environment and services accompanying it, which required lots of meetings with various stakeholders and involvement of bigger team which had to be managed, I have been coordinating the month of #nevicata14LAB activities — discussions, workshops, etc with the international experts on urban and social topics — and moderating large part of it, since the square was opened I’ve been going there several times a week to observe and document all the possible uses and reflect them in our social media channels, I started to speak and write in Italian just for this work — to make hundreds of posts, attends dozens of meetings, communicate with lots of people, I learned about Milanese politics as working with administration you couldn’t avoid it etc,etc,etc.
Large part of the time that I worked for #nevicata14 I was also complaining about what I was doing.
When I studied design at school (both in Russia and Italy) I was taught to be a “multidisciplinary” designer, meaning capable of doing things from services to graphics, business model canvas and user research and many more, but still — “designing” in its old-school terms. Finding problem, solving it using some specific tools, testing it even and passing to the further experts to deal with it.
When we opened the square many people were asking what on Earth I was still doing in this project, saying that it was time to move on and do something new, and I was trying to explain that nope, this is a different type of work, we’re gonna see it through all the period of its functioning, because it is important for many reasons. But left alone I was then doubting my own belief in what I was saying and thinking that maybe I should really move on because there are people more suitable to do social media than me and I waste my design potential doing something I’m not good at.
Because I was never taught and never thought of 80% of things I had to do for #nevicata14 as being within my competence.
I knew about management just cause I always loved to organise myself, but had no idea how to deal with relational issues within team that I had to lead, I had no idea of which “tone” to choose to communicate on socials and was letting some “inappropriate” things to be posted, I had no idea in which way to send things to typography, etcetcetc. I was failing a lot, miserably and painfully, crying in the bathrooms and just dreaming of that ideal workplace in some consultancy where I would just have to draw infinite sketches, make models and talk to people using things instead of angry citizens that want me to be sent for works in Siberia…
It was perfectly true that I was not the best social media manager, team leader, graphic designer and many others just as a pencil is not the best for putting nails in the wall and the hammer is. But that was the thing —
did I want to be a hammer, a pencil, a ruler, even a swiss-knife or the one who can juggle all of them (even if sometimes hurting the toes by things falling in the process)?
Luckily I was stubborn enough to proceed even when it looked like a complete torture and also fortunate to have someone (ciao, Marco!)to push me through it despite all my complaints and resistance. Because on the day of #nevicata14 dismantling with all the fingers frozen while holding the camera and following process for hours I understood clearly what was the real nature of that feeling blessed instead of sad phenomenon.
I will call it designers anti-alienation and emancipation.
Yes, exactly in Marx’s terms. It is about regaining connection to one’s work process and product, about involving all of your human potential (instead of just limited set of skills) in the project to find it being properly objectified for others’ needs, also about being able to use and enjoy that product yourself and eventually fully actualized through it. There were multiple elements in overall #nevicata14 process that made me feel this way and I will explore them better in the next posts, but standing next to the workers unscrewing the stuck bolts became a perfect unmissable culmination of the past year’s work.
It’s been a while that I’m obsessed with topic of changing nature of design which I formulated as “why designers shouldn’t (just) solve the problems” based on both relatively new fields like speculative design developing, very old ideas of “integrated” design of Papanek, but also the general strategic design approach, especially in a way it was formulated by Dan Hill. Apparently it’s time to include also Marx in the references list as here I’ve told just the personal, one designer’s side of the story, but social implications of emancipated design definitely need to be defined better in the future.
Stay tuned ;)
