Stefano Caggiano is a philosopher and design critic with a special interest in design languages. He is Program Leader at the department of Industrial Design of Istituto Marangoni in Milan, and senior researcher at consultancy firm NextAtlas, where he focuses on forecasting new emerging trends in the contemporary visual scene at the crossroads of design, fashion and art. He has published books and articles about design and is a contributing editor for “Interni” magazine, where he writes about aesthetic trends developing in product design and interior decor, within the context of cultural, social and technological evolution. He collaborates with brands as an expert in the semantic positioning of design objects, interior decor elements and accessories, helping clients define strategies informed by design management. / in conversation with Sara Fortunati, director of Turin's Circolo del Design, ed Elisabetta Donati de Conti, author and curator.
Elisabetta: How would you describe the evolution we are immersed in right now?
Stefano: I don’t feel there has been any great evolution, between the beginning of the quarantine and now. Our initial reflex was, “let’s hold our breath for a moment and then we’ll start right back”: we didn’t discuss or try to understand why we slammed against this wall. So now I wonder, are we sure that after crashing we want to get up and keep running in the same direction, at the same speed? We are waiting for the green light to get back on the same track, but that would waste this time we are spending in quarantine. It would be a missed opportunity.
Elisabetta: An opportunity for what? Are there tools we could have used better?
Stefano: We already really use a lot of tools, and there has been a huge increase in the popularity of digital platforms to do everything we can, without skipping a beat. I see that as a missed opportunity: we have a toxic relationship as citizens with our wellbeing, and as creative professionals – myself included – with being social and connected, communicating, making and doing all the time. We are missing out on the opportunity to take distance from what we have always done, and to try looking at ourselves from the outside. When will we ever have another chance like this, to take a few weeks to detach from everything we always speed through? Instead of exploiting this void that has appeared – the “lost interval” Gillo Dorfles wrote about – we seem obsessed by the traffic light turning green. This could be our chance to do better for the future, but we have to think about the past, about the reasons that led us here and about how aggressive we are towards the ecosystem.
Sara: During this emergency, design is coming up with immediate “tactical” solutions; but what kind of more strategic role can design play? Can you design, or develop a long-term theoretical approach, with this level of uncertainty?
Stefano: It’s as if the fog has not lifted yet. As long as we have this uncertainty, trying to think up a new way of designing in the mid- or long-term is not easy. As Italians, we tend to consider design culture as part of humanistic thinking – that is my approach, at least – and therefore expect an evolution in design to derive from deeper change. If we want to have a more long-term and broader approach, we should start connecting the dots: there are islands of plastic, ecosystems under attack, virus spillovers, and there will be future generations. Putting all of this together, we can see that “the end of the world” as we know it will not be a single traumatic event, but a constellation of events that have already started happening. Therefore, thinking strategically means trying to look at things from above, so we can see further in the future as well as in the past. We should try building a reference paradigm by combining the ingredients we already have, but which have not been put together for some reason. Perhaps this will help the fog, the uncertainty, lift and let us start over in a better way.
Elisabetta: Considering your experience in education, what role should schools play in shaping a new strategic thinking?
Stefano: There is not much room to explore alternatives to the hypotheses we can immediately implement, even in education – so it takes a considerable effort to save a few moments to think about design more broadly. Today’s university students – i.e. Generation Z, more or less – are digital natives, while we digital adopters still remember the analog world and can see this phase as post-analog; we have experienced in person how analog and digital converged and merged to the point of total integration. But this integration is a finish line for us, and a starting point for them: they don’t remember the world being any different. However, growing up in this context they have also developed weaker social skills compared to previous generations, because digital devices keep us constantly connected but always a little separate, always allowing users to hide somehow. That is how phenomena like online hating and ghosting began, as a consequence of users’ incomplete social development in this padded sociality. I’m afraid the quarantine will aggravate the problem, because I don’t think kids are in any rush to go back to interacting in the real world after all: they are already used to interacting like this. So the real problem we should consider for the long term, in teaching this generation, is how to respond to the fact that students are aware of the issues but struggle to imagine a viable solution – which I think is something that has stayed under the radar too much. They feel and they experience the problem, fully acknowledging they depend on technology for example, and have challenges in their relationships because they were born in a context that kept them safe from raw sociality, finally making them more fragile. The real challenge, in imagining and exploring alternatives in education, lies within the difficulty of having a constructive dialog with this audience.
Elisabetta: In an article you wrote for “Interni”, you claimed design cannot exist without vision because it requires a horizon of beliefs and references to push towards the future – which ties in with the issue of designing in uncertainty. Can we break through now?
Stefano: The idea of breaking through makes us think of a sort of shell to crack so we can enter. The post-analog world has certainly lost its ability to go in depth, and digital natives miss it – but since they never knew what it felt like, they don’t really know what they are longing for. Even if we tell them and explain, it sounds like that song by Guccini, where an old man describes what the landscape was like a long time ago – and the boy thinks it’s a fairytale, because he never got to see it like that. When we insist on telling these kids about concrete reality as opposed to digital reality, they listen with curiosity – but they’ve never experienced vertical in-depth focus. Imagining how we might break through to them is not easy, but we must certainly try, and I think our generation is the best suited to make an attempt: we are the bridge between analog and digital. The generations after ours will never know both worlds, and the ones before us only experienced the analog dimension. This is our role in history, our responsibility, but it is really hard to know how to act, and I don’t have a recipe for success; perhaps we could use this time in “limbo” to figure one out. I just think we should start from what kids feel, because under the digital or analog tools they may use, what they feel is not that different from what every other generation felt before them – because we are all human beings, and the range of feelings is the same for all of us.
Elisabetta: After all, this very conversation – like so many other activities in this period – aims not to provide answers but to gather some of the clouds that are creating the fog, to better understand it.
Stefano: This is a beautiful metaphor within the metaphor, because this fog of uncertainty is actually born from our too many clouds – meaning our clouds of information. When you overlap an excessive number of layers of transparency you actually generate opacity, and in the end all these clouds turn into a fog. The problem is that those who were born in the fog are unable to imagine a world without it, or a clear path while their head is immersed in an exaggerated and overloaded information ecosystem. The clarity we seek seems to have almost materialized in Venetian canals where water has become transparent, or in the Indian sky, now that you can see the top of the Himalaya from so far. To build an effective storytelling you actually need users to see something different, or it all remains abstract and won’t take root. These clear images impact us on a much deeper level than abstract and hard-to-metabolize data.
Sara: Some say this is only the first of a series of similar experiences that await us in the future.
Stefano: Between deforestation and permafrost melting, the scientific community is pretty unanimously saying we will have to face viruses we are not prepared for, more and more often. We are surrounded by time bombs, and they were not placed at random: they are an integral part of our economic, productive and consumption system, and we are the ones who scatter them.
Sara: Right now, those who are in the position to make decisions taking these time bombs into consideration at the systematic level, and who can react in an organic way, often belong to the generation before ours, and were raised in the system that generated this situation. Meanwhile, younger generations are not really in the position to have the real tools they would need to be engines of change. I agree with your point of view, but do you think that our responsibility as cultural “bridges” comes with a responsibility to act?
Stefano: I have the feeling that Generation Z is falling victim to the fact it was the first generation of true digital natives. I am slightly more optimistic about what the next generation might do, after somehow capitalizing on what Z feels now. Generations are now very compressed, and ours will be able to have an impact even on the one after Z – I think they are calling it Alpha, but that is for marketing specialists to decide. I think, as people who make, or try to make, culture, we will have to look at them too. The problem in building our bridge may be we have been thinking of one that is too short: the real bridge might be between analog and post-Z. Perhaps it will be easier to tune in to that generation because it will have a stronger awareness of the need to find urgent solutions. And one of the ways we can help it find them – which is the real task for the generation that has one foot in each world – is to build a more solid and coherent storytelling about the past and present. As we were saying, the end of the world looks like it will be made up of many little, disorganized ends: finding the connections and a running theme between these events would be useful to shape a clear, shared scenario, so that it becomes clear what new generations – Z, but most importantly Alpha – have to do. Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet, so it could be the sign of a new beginning.
Elisabetta: Are there any specific words you have reflected upon in this past week?
Stefano: I don’t have a specific word, but I would like to evoke a silent text, in a low voice. Silence means not attacking the ecosystem and forests; silence is not making all these objects we constantly throw away. Perhaps my word is “silence”, but not the superhuman silence Leopardi wrote about – cosmic silence – but instead a pre-human silence. We are accustomed to noisy communication, created by always adding more; but silence can actually be used to modulate communication and is the backdrop that makes our message pop. We live as if in a painting full of shapes without a backdrop, where it’s impossible to understand the image. I don’t suggest we should recover silence from the past, but build a little bit of silence and, once it’s built, try to keep it safe. We should build silence, rather than build noise.
