Disordine!
BA Major Design
BA Visual Communication Project
Winter semester
‘Out of diamonds comes nothing’ said De Andrè, and this is even more true in these uncertain times.
In a rapidly changing world, the work of the designer changes at the same speed as society does. Also, even if we could vaguely aspire to have a definition of ‘designer’ at the end of the last century, it is now becoming impossible to define what design will become in the next few years (days). What to design, for whom and how are now an unattainable desire of a discipline that if it does not adapt to contemporary times is doomed to be erased.
In this course the focus will be on “designing” in disorder conditions, or rather, in a more idealistic way, we will try to design disorder.
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything” is a quote by Eisenhower that fits like a glove.
It means that plans on paper and in the small rooms of designers, graphic designers and, in his case, military generals, do not matter if you are not prepared to modify them, and vary them on impact with reality.
‘Design is everything’ is basically an invitation to a new way of approaching design, not as a set of technical skills and predetermined solutions, but as a posture.
What is the designer’s posture? The obvious answer is that we don’t know yet, and we are here to start finding out. The even more obvious one is that there is no right posture.
To exaggerate even further, there is no right or wrong, at most there is suitable and unsuitable, working or not, and even these are not categories that interest us.
What we are interested in is the process. Processes are fluid and changeable paths that imply that we do not necessarily know the results and that by their nature always remain permeable to context…
Context is what really matters.
The world around us has violently revealed to us a new multicentred reality, i.e. there is no longer only one way and one centre. We are surrounded by intersecting and interdependent bubbles that follow different paradigms and rules.
The disorder is the new context. If until a few years ago the designer’s task was to position himself as an external observer capable of glimpsing as an “independent player” design solutions that were impossible to see from the inside, today it is impossible to position himself externally.
Now is the time to take a new posture of immersion, lowering the viewpoint and avoiding the mistake of thinking as in the 20th century – that the solution is to turn to relativism.
In a famous (and not really documented) diatribe between Einstein – the father of the theory of relativity – said that “God does not play dice”. On this occasion, Niels Bohr, who instead worked on quantum physics, answered: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do”.
We have discovered that chance and indeterminacy are at the root of our world and our reality.
Uncoordinated image systems, indeterminate books, random rules and open projects will be the focus of the unexplored path that we will undertake during the semester.
