Introducing Invisible Studio: an interview with Mario Minale
Minale wears many hats: a studio leader at DAE, Professor for Product Design at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, a visiting lecturer and tutor at other institutions, and co-founder of Studio Minale-Maeda. The latter, which he ran with Kinuko Maeda until 2020, functioned predominantly as a research and experimentation environment for alternative production methods, exploring the points of tension between the global and the local, micro and macro, digital and analogue, autonomous and industrial, and lo and hi-tech. All of his roles feed and inform each other, creating a web of research, pedagogy and practice.
Writer and DAE alumnus Emma Lucek spoke to Minale about teaching and what makes a good teacher, the reorientation of the design discipline and ideas of collectivity.
“Teaching contributes to developing and promoting the ideals that I am driven by”
→Emma Lucek: The portfolio from your independent practice is really broad. In your mind, how are the projects bound in terms of ideology, theme or approach?
Mario Minale: They all explore notions of production methods that are alternative to the industrial or craft paradigms, of sufficiency in terms of resources and technology applied, and of coherence with a final cause or purpose rather than the means to reach it.
→EL: You do quite a lot of teaching — at DAE, Willem de Koning, Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe among others. What drew you to teaching and what, would you say, is the thing that surprised you about it most?
MM: I was drawn to teaching as an additional avenue to explore themes and topics that I find relevant and that interest me in my own practice and research, in partnership with students and their views on those. Other aspects are the dissemination of knowledge, the development of personal practice and the teaching methods. You could say that the teaching contributes to developing and promoting those ideals that I myself am driven by in my own research, and that I hope can be of use to others in our collective development of how we deal with our necessities. Those necessities include joy and creativity.
→EL: Does teaching influence your design practice? Do you see them as separate practices?
MM: There is no real separation for me there, it is all very fluid how one informs the other. An example can be how a certain problem is understood and how one decides to deal with it: the experience from either domain will flow into the other. I am not talking about borrowing from students or imposing my style on them but rather that it is all one collective research project with a free flow of information. The dissemination of the accumulated knowledge helps in the teaching to make the discourse accessible to the students and enable them to participate.
“Design and creativity are not exclusive to the profession or discipline of the designer”
→EL: You yourself studied at DAE. Have you noted a shift in the students’ priorities, interests or approaches since you were a student?
MM: There is a greater perceived need for perfection and to excel with life-changing projects, which translates to less space to experiment and discover and to skip on details that don’t translate immediately to images and media attention. This is the case both for students that want to have an artistic career as well as for the more socially oriented ones. This existed in my generation but to a lesser extent.
There is more widespread sensitivity for social and environmental issues and for the involvement and responsibility as designers and as persons than in my generation. However, in most cases, the narrative about competition poses great obstacles for students to truly engage with the social and environmental.
→EL: What do you think predisposes people to being good at teaching? Do you think that to teach design one must also be a designer (working in the field)?
MM: It helps to have a broad cultural base, to be interested in the transmission of knowledge and pedagogy, to have and love a methodology of teaching, next to being a designer. There is such a vast array of knowledge and competence useful to a designer that you don’t need to be a designer necessarily to teach design. I would also say that design – understood as the capacity to conceptualize and plan – and creativity are not exclusive to the profession or discipline of the designer: a lawyer is a designer of the application of law, a doctor a designer of the application of medicine. If, with a notion of trans-disciplinarity, the designer can work in any field, anyone can work in design.
“The preoccupation with visibility and attention should be gradually replaced with silence”
→EL: You say in the introduction to Invisible Studio that the design practice has reoriented. What kind of timeframe do you see for that and could you expand a bit on how you see the design practice reorienting?
MM: It is less connected to the themes and dynamics of the industry, the market and the consumer (be it within the realms of craft, industry or art) and becoming more connected with the designing of the practices of how we live – our cultural techniques and the systems we live in, and the harmonising and rooting of those with the base we rely on for our needs and survival, which is the planet as a whole, complex and interconnected system.
For this, a whole set of new skills and sensitivities are required and need to be integrated. We can start now and have a gradual transition we can keep up with and that we partially shape, or we can wait and have it happen to us no matter what.
→EL: You wrote, “By listening to and observing our surroundings, we place ourselves in the service of collectivity.” Do you think that designers create too much from themselves without an awareness of context or environment?
MM: It is a thing of our society – and even more so of the disciplines we call creative – to become enamoured with one’s babies. A self-referential attitude leads to work that is relevant mainly to oneself. This can help develop curiosity, but when it becomes an end in itself, for example what we might call the pursuit of a style or signature, I would argue it disconnects from any other purpose than recognisability in a market of money or attention. For me, that defies the purpose of design, which is much more connotated with a planning attitude. The planning happens within a real and rooted context and with a purpose within it, ultimately for our own survival.
The time for star designers who disseminated a visual style has ended. In the 40s we had couturiers in Paris, in the 60s we had those iconic industrial designers, in the 80s we had stilisti in Milan. They all had their time with an aura of fame around their individual persona. The selling of the image of the creative I feel appealed to the generation of my parents and this is why you can find it commercialised by an old system of production, be it galleries or brands. For me it is unfashionable and destined to die with all the dangerous vanities of the past couple of centuries.
In the particular case of the students being very self-conscious, I think the preoccupation with visibility and attention should be gradually replaced with silence, listening within and outside and realising the potential and opportunities for pleasure, enthusiasm and learning that surround us. A recognisable signature or visual style is a consequence of inner coherence in the way we work on those opportunities, not an end in itself for the purpose of recognition.