An interview with Marco Ferrari

“Teaching has always been a form of learning”

Emma Lucek: Studio Folder is very busy with challenging and high-profile projects, but you are continuously drawn to teaching — at ISIA University, GSAPP, Royal College of Art, and now DAE. Why? 
  
Marco Ferrari: For me, teaching has always been a form of learning. It’s a way of reframing the work we do at the studio while exposing it to open and unpredictable criticism—but it’s also an opportunity to explore fields of study, methodologies and stories that would otherwise be very difficult to weave into a purely professional practice. It is a form of heartful and unabated collaboration, too, with the students and the other designers and researchers I’ve had the privilege to teach with over the years.

Translating what I learn through practice, reading and conversation into a syllabus, a design brief, or a workshop, allows me to articulate it differently—and almost always more clearly. It encourages me to think about the design practice from a methodological perspective, concocting ways to apply certain thinking and operative patterns to future projects. It’s an exercise in dialogue, reflection and speculation.
 
EL: You originally studied architecture. Do you see yourself as an architect? When someone who doesn’t know you asks what you do — what do you say? 
  
MF: I consider myself mostly a designer because I like the genericity and expansiveness of the term. While I could say that I am also a researcher, an educator and, sometimes, a writer, I still approach these other activities from the perspective of design, which is for their possibility to advance my understanding of the agency of matter, space, systems and information to shape the world we live in. I also appreciate that the figure of the designer, historically, escapes a strict professional enclosure, leaving space for experimentation and a constant redefinition of one’s interests and practice.

While I’m indebted to my training in architecture for a certain critical and spatial thinking, and I’m interested in taking part in the current architectural discourse, I recognise that the term ‘architect’ often links to a specific profession outside of the scope of what I do. On the other hand, a term that I would happily dissociate from its coupling with design-related practices is ‘creative’: most intellectual and manual labour is creative, so designers are no different from scientists, artisans, or writers in this sense.

“A term that I would happily dissociate from its coupling with design-related practices is ‘creative’”

EL: As a student, you were already drawn into the more theoretical aspects of space. What lured you in this direction? 
  
MF: I’ve always seen architecture as a form of knowledge that questions how power relationships unfold through space. I look at space as a medium where conflicts reverberate and exacerbate through scales and where visual evidence of these dynamics is stored indelibly. To access this evidence, we can observe both material sites and all of the media—maps, images, diagrams, documents, and texts—that contribute to their enactment and enable political ideas to have an agency in the physical world. In this sense, architecture as a field of study can expand into many adjacent disciplines, where the focus is not on the outcome of an individual act of design (i.e. a building) but on how the widespread use of some architectural tools shapes the politics of space.  
 
EL: In 2012, you founded Studio Folder with Elisa Pasqual. What was the climate like then for design research and data visualisation? How do you think it has evolved since then? 
  
MF: In the early 2010s, when we started Studio Folder, data visualisation was a well-established and expanding field, surrounded by lots of hype, especially in the news and editorial spheres. It felt like the proliferation of cheap computing power, the contamination between design and coding, and overall abundance of data, and a collective fascination towards an aesthetics of complexity was driving an information graphics renaissance—while neglecting the long history of translating data into images. We realised that there was a lot of emphasis on the presentation of data, but significantly less debate over the processes through which data manifest in the world and the consequences of their visibility or absence. Here we saw the possibility for research and work on projects that tried to explore this path. 
  
Coming from two different backgrounds—architecture and graphic design—we initially struggled to establish a distinctive practice, even to clearly articulate what we were doing to our audience or colleagues. We tried to blend these two disciplines and the tools used in each and made something open to interpretation and further manipulation.  
  
Today, there is much more acceptance of practices that do not focus on a specific medium. You can take more risks in exploring different formats and be more like an amateur in trying to shape a critical discourse without having to rely on professional skills in a particular medium. This is very positive and welcomed, because I find that the anxiety of distinctiveness has been traditionally central to design education while being detrimental to the definition of a design career.

“We can create harm if we aren’t careful about what data can expose”

EL: As an architect, you explore the dynamics of space and spatial interactions. How do you translate that toolkit into the dematerialised world of the illustration of ideas? 
  
MF: Information can be both material and immaterial. It’s common knowledge by now that the ways in which data circulates across the networks that wire our planet are very much material, involving the extraction of natural resources, physical infrastructure and emissions that are growing exponentially to sustain our increasing dependency on online services. If we acknowledge this, then it becomes evident how the design of information happens mostly before any data is visualised.   
 
Data’s modes of production, protocols of collection, and logics of dissemination are the topics where designers should place their focus if they aspire to become a relevant voice in public, critical discourse and contribute to the project of undoing modernity’s legacy of colonialism and violence. Visualisations are important and have a lot of agency, but if considered as the sole domain of design, they lose any relation to the context in which they operate.

Furthermore, we know we are not alone in collecting data: all sorts of sensors, algorithms, and countless machinic eyes collect data all the time, as we also do whenever we observe the world or talk to someone. This process is akin to one of extraction, in a very similar way in which we extract resources from the environment. We can create harm if we aren’t careful about what the data can expose.   
   
EL: Data visualisation is typically considered at its ‘best’ when it aims to be informative and impartial. Do you think that it can be?  
 
MF: Graphics is always informative, by definition. And it is always partial, in the sense that it reflects many biases that we can be aware of or not. One of the most important aspects of information design is providing the key to understanding how data have been edited and visualised, by making accessible the process of their translation into an image so that the latter can become a gateway to further research rather than a finished product.

I don’t see efficiency or legibility as a purely aesthetic value, in the sense of something that recalls a form of graphic minimalism, for example. If we consider graphics as a form of writing, one that can convey complexity in a different form than purely written text and can unveil relationships through alternative paradigms of communication, then efficiency goes beyond the visual appearance, involving the medium of communication, the context, the reader. It is achieved by conveying multiple perspectives within the same visualisation.

“To commit to the social and political responsibility of design within this planetary crisis… is my most urgent preoccupation”

EL: What are some of your obligatory design research and/or information design materials?   
 
MF: Whenever I start a new research project, I delve as much as possible into the histories of the topic at hand, and I primarily look into archives and documents. Besides this, I read a lot of scientific papers, trying to understand the established theories behind certain domains of knowledge. And, of course, I am inspired and indebted to the practice and writing of many artists and researchers I try as much as possible to be in dialogue with.

In recent years, I’ve been hugely inspired by the work of Shannon Mattern, Julian Oliver, Taryn Simon, James Bridle, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, and Trevor Paglen—along with many other thinkers and artists who are exploring the role of systems, technologies, and apparatuses in shaping our material world, visual language and collective subconscious.

Another important reference for me is the work of Susan Schuppli. In particular, her way of looking at landscapes as layered archives of information, where every process is registered through peculiar forms of materiality. This attitude of reading data as strata—and the concern for how various scientific practices sense and render them—also lies at the centre of my interests.

If I had to name a single book that influenced me the most over the past ten years, it would be Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. It’s an account of how the idea of objectivity changed from the eighteenth century to nowadays, as seen through the evolution of scientific practice and its methods of visualisation. It is very much a combined history of technology, science, and information design, told through words as much as through images. It questions the origins of authority, radically challenging us to think about the modes in which truth and power are embedded into images and information.

“I would love to find more ways for the MA to become a repository of tools and shared sets of resources for a larger community of scholars”

EL: If design education is where the discipline of design can be reshaped, what’s your first port of call? 
  
MF: The current debate on themes of inclusivity, mental health, and the toxicity of certain environments that is shaking a lot of institutions—both in academia and in the profession, thanks to the courage of the students, interns and employees that are speaking up to denounce abuses that for a long time were considered acceptable within these places—is one of the most important points on the agenda.

Personal wellbeing and mental health cannot be separated from planetary caretaking. If the ambition is to tackle these issues, we have to start from the places and communities where design practice is nurtured. Schools are also where we should first and foremost understand design in conversation with other forms of knowledge, and the role of the designer not as an isolated practitioner nor an individual creator. That’s the first big step. 
 
EL: When it comes to the Information Design MA, what key principles or values are you looking to focus on? 
 
MF: Scientists working on the IPCC report have issued a “final warning,” stating there is no more time to postpone a radical shift towards a low-carbon economy. To commit to the social and political responsibility of design within this planetary crisis by addressing the entangled relationships between racial discrimination, spatial violence, and the climate emergency is my most urgent preoccupation.

On more practical aspects, I would love to foster an environment where a solid technical proficiency is paired with intellectual rigour and curiosity: every project should also act as a critical reflection on the tools and systems it relies upon.

Finally, I would love to find more ways for the MA to become a repository of tools and shared sets of resources for a larger community of scholars, where the documentation of research methodologies, the access to datasets and case studies, could be an important part of the dissemination of students’ projects.