Designer, lecturer and partner at IdLab, Stefano Mirti has been on the forefront of teaching innovation for years with projects like Design 101, Relational Design and many more. He was in charge of Expo Milan 2015’s social media for two years, has been director of the Scuola Superiore di Arte Applicata del Castello Sforzesco in Milan since September 2017, and president of Fondazione Milano from July 2019. You can find him on Instagram, or look up his Facebook page to find a great archive of countless suggestions, references and ideas. His newsletter is known as Letterine, and his full résumé is online on LinkedIn. / in conversation with Sara Fortunati, director of Turin's Circolo del Design, ed Elisabetta Donati de Conti, author and curator.
Elisabetta: From your point of view, what is the instant impact of the lockdown in Italy?
Stefano: It has definitely had a relevant impact on work: at the studio (Id Lab), we are thinking about what will happen when the projects we are now carrying out will have to stop, and what new directions we will go in. At the same time, we sense that new needs and demands will emerge, and as the world changes we will be entrusted with different types of work.
Sara: Completely different opportunities?
Stefano: Yes, for sure. The world is changing at the speed of light, so objects and services that were useful up until a moment ago might be less needed now, and others might become more useful or necessary. This is an interesting phenomenon, and one that is immediately visible in education. I am the director of Super (Scuola Superiore di Arte Applicata del Castello Sforzesco di Milano), which is based on a mechanism that is far from simple: the school covers its expenses with tuition paid by students who attend class; so if there cannot be classes, it has no income. Therefore, right now we are more motivated than ever to imagine new ways we can teach – else the school will shut down. Millions of Italian children and teens are home right now, and school is turning into a social broadcast living on Facebook or WhatsApp, geared towards these age groups in particular. Teaching is generally turning into a daily program of free lessons and content, available to anyone.
In our case, the lockdown has become an opportunity to imagine a shift in paradigm and to lay the foundations for this change, engaging both our teachers and our students in rethinking what courses are and how they are used.
Elisabetta: A debate has started about the fact that this sudden digitalization of our schools is creating issues of social inequality; what is your long-term vision about the innovation of education? Will we reach some sort of right to technology, or will this become another cause for barriers and discrimination?
Stefano: Society is a system of social classes with different financial capabilities. Some families have access to high-quality resources, services and goods while others don’t. That said, stopping new technologies would not close this economic and social gap.
My idea is that these new technological tools will make accessing and sharing many services, as well as knowledge, easier: for example, organizing an online course that can be attended remotely costs one tenth of starting a traditional one, with teachers, classrooms, books and equipment – and this is an extraordinary contribution to democratization. By leveraging digital tools, education suddenly becomes a lot less expensive, which is an obvious benefit.
Sara: Do you think this great collective exercise that all schools – more or less prepared – had to face all of a sudden will leave a mark for the future? Will schools actually embrace this new method, based on technology and the web?
Stefano: Yes and no. I’d say yes, because this is an incredible release: teachers, students, and the average family had never tried this experiment and now they have, so there is no going back on this. But on the other hand, I’m also slightly pessimistic because I think the point is not transferring the previous method – for example, frontal lectures – to a virtual version, by putting the teacher in front of a webcam. This is fine during the emergency, but in “normal” situations the online world has a completely different approach, and the process should start from foundations that have nothing to do with traditional models. I think overcoming these models will be the change that takes the longest.
Sara: Is anyone embracing or experimenting with educational methods that are truly new, and are not an attempt at recreating what we had before?
Stefano: Yes, there are a number of examples, and we have mapped many of them as we look for the right solution for our school – so we have made it a very intense and systemic exercise. The MoMA is a good example because a few days ago they launched a photography course: it’s interesting because the museum understood it didn’t need to put its collection online, but to focus on other desires and needs in their community. Another example is the Polytechnic University of Milan, which was able to move some 800 courses online over twenty-four hours, proving incredible muscle power.
For now, we have found the approach that best fits our needs is to divide courses into a first part that is accessible to anyone and free, and a second part that is more in-depth and requires paying a fee. Any relational aspects, such as talking to teachers, having work corrected and receiving feedback, have higher value and therefore are part of the second module.
For the past few years we had experimented with different solutions, but if you had asked me one month ago how the Scuola di Arte Applicata del Castello Sforzesco operates, I would have said 95% of activities followed a traditional format, the remaining 5% representing experimental online courses. Now we are going through an extraordinary metamorphosis, which will soon lead to us having a lot of online courses, at various levels, and intensive final workshops. The school is actually undergoing a two-fold change, because students don’t need to come to Milan to attend anymore: whether they are in Turin, Naples, Catania or New York, and whether they speak Italian or not, they can complete a course and then come in person to the final workshop, which will be condensed into four days. It’s what journalists call “digital first”: the New York Times now considers its mobile version as its first priority, its website the second, and its print version the third. Most Italian publications still come out in print first, put content on the web second, and only in the end focus on social media. Too bad the world now operates in the exact opposite order.
Sara: You have a head start because you have been thinking about and experimenting with educational solutions that go in this direction for years, starting from the Master in Relational Design at the Abadir Academy in Catania. But what is lost in this transformation?
Stefano: You definitely lose some important elements in didactics, such as physical presence and the nuances of a relationship, but we have to understand it is simply a different way of learning. It’s like deciding to buy a professor’s book instead of going to his class at university; of course the class is more interesting, but if you cannot physically attend, the book gives you the chance to access most of the information. I don’t think online solutions are a replacement, but a complement. Just like a traditional festival could never be replaced by an event streamed online – but streaming could add new elements that weren’t there before.
Elisabetta: Do you think that using these technologies and the infrastructures that support them can have an impact on the morphology of our cities in the long-term, or on our public and private spaces, and the ways we live our daily lives in relation to them?
Stefano: I think our spaces will remain unchanged: having Wi-Fi and computers, there is no reason to live in the home of the future – my home of the past is perfect, with all of its objects of the past. The debate about this – new technologies, smart cities, paperless offices – has been going on for twenty or thirty years, but everything stays pretty much the same.
Elisabetta: When the computer was invented, it was described as an extraordinary invention for humanity because it would allow people to live in the countryside instead of moving to cities to work. But that is not what happened; in fact the trend is completely the opposite. So do online solutions resolve only some forms of global connections, but not local ones?
Stefano: Precisely because we can work remotely, we’ve developed a type of economy that makes being in the city important. The fact that we don’t need to physically go to the office does not automatically mean that we move to the mountains, while in a way the fact that we can work remotely makes school buildings and office buildings less necessary. After all, neighborhood stores – which many still prefer – have been struggling since eBay and Amazon came around, but had already been challenged by the arrival of shopping malls. Personally, I find it hard to imagine that, just because we have so many digital services available, our homes or our cities will change dramatically. But we’ll have to wait and see what happens in the next few months.
Elisabetta: In this context, what educational role could great institutions play? I am thinking of the 999 – A Collection of questions about contemporary living exhibition at the Triennale di Milano: if you had to imagine it after this lockdown, would it be different? Do you think there are issues that have become more urgent in the past three weeks?
Stefano: We are actually having fun imagining a new edition of 999. The most remarkable and valuable element in the whole experience has been the WhatsApp group created by all curators and participants, who kept in touch over all these years. In the past few weeks, since we are all forced to stay home and “home” was the theme of the exhibition, we started to think we should do something, maybe a 999 reloaded or a second version focused on the current situation. The real issue is not what is happening now, but what will come after.
Elisabetta: What do you think will happen?
Stefano: I think it’s likely the future will be scary. I would like it not to be, but if I put all the information we have together, I expect we will face a hard challenge in social, economic and cultural terms.
Sara: What is the scariest part?
Stefano: The economy. When it’s all said and done, the situation will not normalize until a vaccine is found. So if we continue to have this problem for six months, one year, two years, and Italy’s economy is forced to continue to go on at this slow pace for so long, the consequences are unimaginable. All we can do is prepare, and continue to diligently work at our experiments and adjustments.
