UK £10
COPENHAGEN
STOCKHOLM
LONDON
CRAFTED FOR CUSTOMISATION | BM SHELVING SYSTEM |
BØRGE MOGENSEN | 1958
Børge Mogensen’s flexible shelving system – in the spirit of the furniture architect – invites individual applications. The carefully crafted system, which consists of shelves and cabinets with elegant details, accommodates changes that life presents: it can be expanded, built up and adapted to individual needs. In stores from October 2020.
carlhansen.com
MILAN
TOKYO
OSAKA
NEW YORK
SAN FRANCISCO
Home Stories 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors Until 28.02.2021
#VDMHomeStories #VitraDesignMuseum www.design-museum.de
Main Partner
Vitra Design Museum
In the Circumstances Words Oli Stratford
As you might imagine, 2020 has not been a banner year for international design media. The projects and events that we typically report on have largely been cancelled; the travel we undertake has been variously paused, complicated, or otherwise rendered unwise; while the funding model we rely upon has been so thoroughly obliterated that any prospect of economic recove- well, perhaps best not to get into that last one. We haven’t even been able to go to those bougie prosecco press receptions, as is our wont. Not that the challenges facing the media have been unique – the last few months have been horrendous for everybody. It’s a period that has seen deaths from Covid-19 rise to 1.03 million; that has highlighted the complete absence of equity within our societies; and which has wreaked devastation upon small businesses and community services, while concurrently enabling others to swell their wealth grotesquely (the Institute for Policy Studies found that US billionaires increased their worth by $845bn between March and September 2020). Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the prosecco thing. Tough times, then, and it’s with this in mind that you may notice that this issue of Disegno is somewhat Introduction
Once More, With Empathy A roundtable about empathy as a tool for addressing inequalities and failures within design culture. Panellists Georgina Johnson, Mariana Pestana and Sumitra Upham
The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020. Present on the call were Georgina Johnson, the founder and editor of new anthology The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to Creative Balance, which traces how the creation of new, empathetic values within the design industries might address the field’s failings around sustainability and move towards more regenerative practices and modes of thought; Mariana Pestana, curator of the fifth Istanbul Design Biennial, which opens in October 2020 and is themed “Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one”; and Sumitra Upham, curator of programmes for the Istanbul Design Biennial, as well as a senior curator at the Design Museum. She is currently leading the 2020 Designers in Residence programme, the theme of which is “Care”.
52
Georgina Johnson I’ve
come to a junction in the road where I’m re-imagining professionalism and trying to undo a rhythm in myself. I’m undoing many ideologies that have been indoctrinated subconsciously – through education, media and broader culture – about how we have to continuously produce. I think society has anti-human ideas around time: ideas around what
“I had to say ‘I want to write how I talk’. There needs to be space for that. Using your own voice cannot be deemed ‘unprofessional’.”
Images courtesy of Georgina Johnson and The Slow Grind; and the Istanbul Design Biennial.
—Georgina Johnson
we should be doing with our time and what our output should be. So right now I am undergoing an empathetic process where I am giving myself more time, and where I accept that everything isn’t going to be done exactly how I picture it. I’m embracing the idea of things evolving on their own. I was coming to this awakening a few years ago when I started on the project that has now become The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to Creative Balance. It may be the first intersectional creative environmentalist text – one that considers and proposes paths towards a more symbiotic and reparative relationship with human and non-human communities, which have been extracted from to the point of decline and systematic exhaustion. It’s addressing questions of creative, social and environmental regeneration in response to ideas around sustainability. It’s questioning the hyperacceleration of society and how that doesn’t give us a moment to pause and think about whether the modes in which we’re living, or the structures we’re a part of, are conducive to having a balanced life and positive mental wellbeing, and how those connect to societal injustice, inequality and inequity. It’s fertile ground for an intersectional education – centring on themes of empathy, race and postcolonialism, climate justice, mental health, material culture, and slow fashion – to encourage a deep unlearning.
Sumitra Upham I
had the honour of writing the foreword for The Slow Grind and I think that what your book allowed for was the time and space to properly reflect on some of these issues in a more concentrated way than life ordinarily allows. Georgina A lot of people who hadn’t written long-form before, or hadn’t written in that style, attempted it for the first time with The Slow Grind. It was interesting to see that it became an active, energetic space that could accommodate completely different tones and approaches. I felt that it became quite a democratic process, in that it met people where they were and encouraged them to explore different ways of working with texts and exploring their ideas through writing. It encouraged me to do the same, because I hadn’t written an essay in a really long time and was quite conscious of style, but I had to lay those things down and say “I want to write how I talk.” There needs to be space for that – using your own voice cannot be deemed “unprofessional”. Mariana Pestana Allowing yourself to be true to yourself in the things that you do professionally is so brave, but I find it incredibly difficult to actually do. When I did my PhD, my supervisor was Jane Rendell and she wrote this book about situated writing called Site-Writing. Jane really encouraged me to develop a certain truth in the way I wrote and I definitely became much more conscious of making an effort towards not being what I think of as “professional”. She helped me become more comfortable with not just following a norm – that I perceived as the way that things should be done. But in hearing you, Georgina, speak about empathy and its connection to time, the way that I have been thinking about it is more in terms of scale, at least in my curatorial practice. It’s become about proposing an understanding of design as being concerned, not just with a primary function or primary client, but with the many entities that are impacted by the creation of any design. That’s what I mean by scale – thinking from the very large scale of landscapes impacted by extraction due to the production of a design, for example, down to the very tiny scale of the microbial or chemical reactions that happen within a system of production and consumption. By having that consideration, we could develop a culture of deeper attachment towards the things that surround us. Sumitra For me, curation has always been something that’s enabling, nurturing and supportive. I came out of a school of thought that looked at curation
Roundtable