AW: GEO—DESIGN is a new term for most people, what does it mean in the context of this master’s department?
Simone Farresin: For us, it is a way of describing the context for design today – it is not just about the needs of the user, but also the infrastructures and systems that are shaping the world. There is a necessity for designers to work more critically within this context, to observe these infrastructures and rethink how we are participating within them, to completely rethink the discipline, especially in light of the current environmental and ecological crisis.
It is also to do with scale. From the planetary scale, which is necessary to allow us to observe dynamics that are otherwise impossible to understand, to the hyper-local. But also other forms of measurement, like time – design can operate at different time scales. A short-term intervention might be about designing a product, but we also need medium-term interventions and long-term, visionary interventions. Designers who base their practice on well thought-through research will be able to operate across those scales.
AW: How will the MA differ from existing design departments?
Simone Farresin: There hasn’t been enough collective thinking in design education. We want to move more towards a group research model, where research is shared and then individual outcomes can come out of it. As a department, GEO—DESIGN will grow like an octopus, with a central consciousness and far-reaching tentacles.
We want to go beyond design as something human-centric and start thinking about other species, which is something that is not necessarily being addressed. It’s not enough anymore to only think about ourselves. We want designers to go beyond artistic self-expression and search for more radical transformations of reality.
Andrea Trimarchi: We want to look at the ethical and even existential question of what design is and answer it with a collective approach.
With the work we have done recently, like Ore Stream last year, we have seen other disciplines taking an interest – scientists being interested in collaborating with designers. This is something we would like to explore more with the department as well, bringing in people who are far from our discipline to teach. Designers need to communicate complex narratives, we want to help them find the tools to do this.
AW: What kind of students do you hope to attract?
Andrea Trimarchi: We want to gather different kinds of people – for example, I would like to see a philosopher on the department, or an activist or someone working in governance. But it’s important that they understand the potential of design.
They will still graduate with a design project. So they should be interested in design’s potential for research and for creating change. We are creating an umbrella for narratives that are already found in design education – like the ecological crisis – but don’t have a place where they can be really addressed in-depth or addressed collectively, so they will never grow. We need to create this umbrella for these narratives that will otherwise remain fragile.
AW: How is this going to relate to your own work as Formafantasma?
Simone Farresin: We are not interested in turning students into designers like us. We hope to be educating a generation that will brilliantly out-perform us.
What we hope is that the department will work as a studio, where the building up of ideas is also collective. One idea that we have at the moment – although we have to see how that will develop – is to use our exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in March 2020 on the industry of timber as a starting point. We would like to use that opportunity to show that research and ideas can be shared and to have the students working with the research we’ve been conducting in the last year. More and more, the commercial side of our studio is detaching from the research part and the research part is becoming more radical. We see this part becoming closer to our approach to education.
AW: Do you think young designers are craving more places to explore radical approaches?
Andrea Trimarchi: Totally, yes!
Simone Farresin: There is an instinctive need for radical change right now. If that is not regulated it can go wrong. You can see that in contemporary politics. Education is the right place to be in the same moment radical and extremely rooted in the now and what is necessary.