The Milan Triennale puts the focus on the restorative design

This 2019, Milan will be more than ever the world capital of design, with a new edition of its historic and pioneering design triennial, born in 1923 and of which 21 editions have been held aperiodically. The 22nd appointment of the event opens on March 1 and has been conceptualized by Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA and director of R&D at the same institution. Her proposal takes the disturbing name of Broken Nature and appeals in a radical way to the progressive and irreparable breakage of links with nature that ensures that humanity will lead to extinction. Faced with this apocalyptic scenario, Antonelli and her curatorial team have selected some 100 projects that place the focus on the role of design as a restorer of these links, a task that according to the curator will not save us from extinction but will contribute to the design of a more worthy and fair extinction for the next species.

The 2nd symposium on the subject took place at MoMA this past Monday 14th of January, as part of a research project that the curatorial team has shared live through the web, and that will culminate with the opening of the exhibition on March 1st at the Triennale di Milano Museum. In this article we review the keys of the concept of restorative design through the opinions of the curator and a selection of participants in the show that were shared during the symposium.

Where does the idea restorative design come from?

Paola Antonelli (Curator): The idea of restorative design comes from the concept of restaurants. Restaurants where born in France in the 18th century as places where you could go and have healthy food and at the same time experience conviviality and pleasure. So it’s health and pleasure at the same time. And that’s really what we thought design could be: it can be at the same time right and positive but it doesn’t have to sacrifice pleasure and sensuality.

Why is it necessary to talk about restorative design today?

Paola Antonelli: The social, cultural and political ecosystems that we have created are irreparably destroying the natural ecosystems we live in. The idea of restorative design is one that is committed to the idea of repairing and building connections with the natural environment that ensure a genuinely collective survival of both humans and the natural environment to which they belong. These connections are currently broken and we are navigating a self-destructive course in which design has a key responsability. Restorative design, one that tries to fix these damages, must be applied at all scales and in all dimensions of life. In the exhibition we will talk about encouraging new behaviors and systems that use objects – both physical and digital -, speculative scenarios and functional tools, architecture, fashion, science, technology, etc. The ending is inevitable, but restorative design can help us design a better ending.

What is “data humanism” and where does its restorative potential lie?

Giorgia Lupi (Information Designer): As an information designer, I advocate for data humanism. Data humanism is a different approach to the data world to ultimately reconnect data to what it stands for, which is always our imperfect and messy lives. I always like to remind my designers and clients that, as banal as it sounds, data actually doesn’t exist. Data is an instrument that we, human beings, created to record reality, it’s one of the tools we have to represent reality, but it’s always a placeholder for something else and never the real thing, and sometimes that can get lost.

So instead of focusing on the numbers technology and algorithms around data, we must always focus on what data represents: people, stories, ideas. Only then, data can become a powerful tool to abstract our realities according to different relevant factors every time, to analyse ideas in contexts that we normally cannot grasp and to start new conversations as opposed to the ultimate answer to our questions. And this is why we have to reclaim a personal approach to how data is captured, analysed and displayed. Improving that subjectivity in context plays a big role even in understanding big events and social changes, especially when data is about people.

And why in the term humanism? Well in the renaissance humanism, european intellectuals put an end to the dark medieval times by placing the human nature instead of god at the center of their view of the world. Well, I believe something similar needs to happen with the universe of data. Nowadays data is treated like a god: keeper of infallible truth for our present and our future. I believe that to make data faithfully representative of our human nature we need to start designing ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities into how we process, interpret and display it.

I envision a renaissance where talking about data will mean talking about its intimate qualities and conversations that will be shaped around subjective and imperfect aspects. I envision a new approach where data driven design is replaced by design driven data, because we will design the ways we will approach data depending on its unique context everytime and where ultimately, instead of using data only to become more efficient we will only usa data to become more human.

What is the restorative potential of speculation?

Thomas Thwaites (Designer): Speculation can act in many ways but I think that its reparative potential lies in how it can help to reveal the unconscious cultural myths we live by. This is because how you react to speculation tells you something about what you have been expecting. So if you accept speculation easily then perhaps it’s just kind of reinforcing your personal mythology but if you react in other ways: with surprise, with joy, with horror, maybe with kind of annoyance, then your reaction reveals something about your assumptions, maybe your unexamined assumptions.

I have a semi speculative project in the Broken Nature show. I attempted to escape the pressures of being a human by transforming myself into a goat. The reactions to that project were firstly “what an absurd, ridiculous thing to do”, but there were also the secondary reactions: “yes it’s absurd, but maybe not so much”. What is absurd on speculating about a different destiny (living in a grassy hillside happily as a goat)? Revealing these myths we live by can help us understand them and maybe change them, and that is where I see the potential of speculation.

In what way can human and non-human agents collaborate towards alternative futures?

Chris Woebken (Co-founder of The Extrapollation Factory): Our practice was established on the premise that writing stories and holding conversations about futures are important social activities that should be actively shaped by communities. Historically, futures have depicted corporate and top down scenarios, but rarely, if ever, have asked individuals what they want their futures to be like. My practice has been researching ways to help non-futurists engage and explore these futures through design. My goal is to empower people to envision their own preferred futures and the roads that lead to those visions.

A project call “Transition habitats” helps the public to listen to non-human indicator species and then interpret their messages as proposals for futures. We started by asking the public to remagine parts of the urban infrastructure in ways that would serve human and non-human needs. In an effort to filter and develop a vastness of concepts we shared the ideas with the community of biologists and ecologists to garner expert feedback and to evolve these concepts. We resolved the project in the Walker Art Center garden by deploying an interspecies Postal Service system that allows for the interpretation of the monitor data of non-human inhabitants as postcards to be sent to local politicians. What messages would a non-human organism sent to a decision maker? If a non-human individual messaged a politician, would they be considered a constituent? How could the nation’s communication infrastructure be redesigned to serve non-human organisms? I believe that participatory futures have the potential to seek restorative design narratives and to support navigating towards preferable relationships with our ecosystems.

How can design help devise a better welfare system?

Hilary Cottam (Social Entrepreneur): The “Social Insurance and allied services” report by Sir Williams Severidge is one of the most important design blueprints in the world: it’s the guidelines for the british welfare state and it set out new plans for health and education. It transformed the lives of millions, not only in the UK but around the world when these principles and mindsets where exported. But today, I think many of these principles doesn’t work anymore. We face a whole host of new problems, we live in different ways, we have new forms of poverty, and we need a different set of design principles.

So why do I think that design is critical? Firstly, if we are going to solve the problems of today: living with chronic health conditions, aging, living on a fragile planet, then we are going to need new tools and new ways of working: ways that help us to collaborate, ways that bring in new disciplines and give them a shared language to work together. And secondly, I think that technology is gonna be critical in the solutions we design. And design, above all, can help us work at that critical intercept between the human and the technological. In my book “Radical Help” I identified six new design guidelines that I think we could use as the principles for a new form of collaboration to solve the social challenges of today.