Introducing Studio Technogeographies
In Muzi’s hands "design becomes a lens to investigate the social, anthropological, material, technological and geopolitical conditions characterising the present,” she explains.
Studio Technogeographies will build on this idea, interrogating the meaning and function of design and ‘unveiling the economies and the resources behind the things we consume and materials we use, as well as the implications and materiality of our digital lives and projects’, says Muzi, who is based between Italy and the Netherlands.
With a design-research-based curriculum built collaboratively by its students and tutors, each semester will have its own theme, echoing Muzi’s approach to the curation of GEO–DESIGN, which has centred around subjects including sand, Covid-19 and junk.
Nadine Botha – research designer, curator, writer and fellow DAE tutor – interviewed Martina Muzi to find out more about her approach and plans for Studio Technogeographies.
→ Nadine Botha: You have already made a significant mark on Design Academy through your curation of the GEO—DESIGN series, and now will be returning to lead a Bachelor’s studio. Yet you graduated from Design Academy just a few years ago. Tell us how you have evolved your practice since being a student here.
Martina Muzi: After receiving my master’s degree in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2013, I began an independent research practice alongside working at Space Caviar (the studio founded by current DAE creative director Joseph Grima and Tamar Shafrir in 2013) right at the beginning. This made it possible to explore design both independently and in a studio structure, which was a really important combination.
In my work, design becomes a lens to investigate the social, anthropological, material, technological and geopolitical conditions characterising the present. I’m fascinated with understanding how things, people, economies, cultures, infrastructures are interconnected and function together or in isolation. Questioning existing standards and imagining new, possible standards is also a big theme that has continued from my studies.
My work is grounded in dedicated field research and expressed through multimedia formats. What I have become conscious of through long-term field research projects is that in observing reality from a design point of view, I was also designing a point of view that—when adjusted according to different scales—revealed different patterns and typologies. For example, across the Italian landscape of gardens and concrete houses, or the virtual territory of Minecraft, or the commodity markets of Shenzhen and Zhejiang Province in China. This patterning changes across different communities and economics, which constellate around needs, and different patternings manifest different realities, together with different meanings of design itself.
Instead of being the result of a single genius at a single time in a single place, design is a needed response that emerges from the accessibility to tools, resources and ideas, and starts to appear in several places at the same time. Interrogating where designs and designers might travel often sparks a new vein of research. How to make it travel in different ways or creating the space for its arrival and departure is what guides my interest in curating design projects, exhibitions or programmes.
→ NB: What is the role then for the designer, and by extension, design education?
MM: The basic definition of design might still be the relationship between creativity and industries. However, it’s essential to consider the conditions in which it happens. In today’s complex world, what even are the industries and for who or with who are we designing? Design became for me a tool to approach this question, and the other questions that arose entering the massive market in Shenzen as a complete foreigner, for example. How does one enter and place oneself within a large-scale context? Once within a context, what are the patterns and differences? What are the rigidities and rules within the system, and where are the cracks, the black holes in which creativity is free? What can one do within the crack? How does one work in a system when the system isn’t represented by money?
In my own practice I have tried to respond to these questions by approaching design in a more distributed way, seeking authenticity rather than solutions, and recognising that design takes time; design is a never-ending practice. Working with specific case studies is important because otherwise these questions remain theoretical. Design is then not necessarily about responding to the urgency within complexity, but rather understanding and finding a specific point in which the designer can take the responsibility to act within a network of other people, where the urgency becomes tangible. I don’t believe in the isolation of resources and minds, and find that by creating a framework that interlinks independent researchers within one project, a space for new languages of design in terms of materials, techniques, production and accessibility can emerge. Different people always observe different aspects with different precisions and depths. An exhibition can offer a narrative or reading of the collective intelligence that emerges. This is the framework of the GEO—DESIGN exhibitions and at the base of my curatorial approach.
→ NB: The GEO—DESIGN exhibitions that you have co-curated with Joseph Grima since 2018 represent a significant shift for Design Academy’s exhibitions, which were previously focused on the design object and usually curated around a trend. What is the model behind them?
MMi: The GEO—DESIGN exhibition model addresses many of the challenges of design curating. For me, curatorial practice requires personal commitment and respectful sensitivity to the unique socio-spatial sites and individuals that become entangled with each project, as well as critical self-awareness about one’s role in the evolution of the design field. The GEO—DESIGN exhibition is structured around a process of research rather than a final object, and the series is an inquiry into how we as designers can approach complexities that cross territories, infrastructures, logistics, materials, resources, labor and so on under specific themes. The model is based on three-month exhibition residencies, in which alumni of Design Academy Eindhoven work on a different case study under the theme of a specific geopolitical frontier within the design discipline, and I meet with participants every two weeks. Applying a design perspective to a specific case study allows for research, thinking and actions that mirror complexity without reducing it.
NB: How do you foresee your approach to design and collaborative practice manifesting in the Bachelor’s studio you will be leading?
MM: It’s a real opportunity to be thinking, organising and curating the new studio within DAE, where an expansive approach to what constitutes design is constantly in play.
The challenge for a pedagogical framework is to inspire curiosity and interest, while nurturing the skills, the language and the tools needed to work within today’s unprecedented complexity. The challenge is also to create a pedagogical framework in which the design outcome is part of the research itself, where there is a continual exploration – both individual and collective – of what design is.
Studio Technogeographies will be a research-based design project as a whole. It aims to bring systems of design, extraction, transportation, manufacturing, commerce, consumption, and geopolitical forces both human and non-human from sites across the world to the centre of design education.
It also aspires to have a building block structure in which students can link in and out at any moment of its development. Semesters will be focused on specific themes and students and tutors will create the design curriculum together, step by step. I imagine the studio in a state of continual evolution and adaptation. Unveiling the economies and the resources behind the things we consume and materials we use, as well as the implications and materiality of our digital lives and projects, will be fundamental to our approach. Finally, there is also the essential challenge of knowing when to stop researching and start dancing with reality by thinking and making alternative possible scenarios.
