 Okay, we're going to start welcome to the two arguments lecture series. We're super happy to have here today Simone Farracin from Forma Fantasma. Simone's work together with Hispani in Forma Fantasma is really done a great, I would say, even revolution in the way design is being thought of and the way also the relationship of objects with larger systems. It's mobilized as part of the design and debug. Oscar Arnorsson is going to be presenting Simone and Jonah Rowan. It's going to be helping moderate the panel afterwards. Thank you, Andres. I am delighted to be here today to introduce Simone Farracin, one of the designers of Forma Fantasma. Simone and his partner Andrea Trimarsci established their research-based practice while at the Design Academy in Eindhoven in the Netherlands from where they graduated in 2009. Since then they have produced in their Amsterdam studio a rich body of design work at the nexus of aesthetics, politics, and material culture for a number of clients and institutions. Too many to enumerate here. Today we're here to discuss their multi-year investigation into the recycling of electronic waste titled Orestreams developed over the course of three years 2017 to 2019 and commissioned by NGV Australia and Triennale Milano. The title implies a flow of minerals above the surface of the earth as opposed to the molten materials of the earth's crust. As your compelling narrator perceptibly points out in the beginning, this stream is purely anthropocentric. No other terrestrial life form presumably has removed minerals from the earth and much less transformed them into something else. Correct me if I'm wrong. The stream therefore requires a process of human circulation and these are slides from the film. The stream therefore requires a process of human circulation. At the moment human activity stops for example through mass distinction. This stream will cease and over the course of million years or millions of years the metals will slowly sink back through the mantle into the earth's core to be recirculated by some other extractive intelligent life form at a later point. On the surface it all looks like these metals organize human activity. One might even be tempted to believe that they organize human activity just as much as human activity organizes them and I show here this kind of terrifying image that comes on at the point in the film when we are told that in 2009 so-called smart objects there were more smart objects in the world that there were that there were people. So no wonder that historical periods used to be named after materials excavated from the earth, stone age, bronze age, iron age or that entire monetary systems have been built up around the particular characteristics of particular metals or particular materials often metals. Now to build on that your film shows us that humans are more organized there by their metals than ever before and the image of the human pinging from one device to the to another from the refrigerator to the toaster to the washing machine. Machines that organize biological processes cotton, wheat, bread while also being signifiers of middle-class life is somehow horrifying and I return a little bit to this image because I almost start being able to see like the kind of the concentric nodes in this system which as almost these appliances and the humans kind of circulating between the appliances in a kind of a turn of the tables. Throughout the film the engineer architect designer wherever she appears seems hopelessly complicit. If not a defining actor then at best a figure almost as pliable as the metals she applies her designs to. Even so at the end you arrive at a fairly honest and straightforward plea for design and something like a positive mission where you claim that and I quote design can play a role. It is not just about shaping materials but investigating and guiding what happens before that moment and from that point onwards. It can be a tool to limit and heal the damage caused by its needs rather than a mechanism to invent new desires and immediately frustrates them. What you claim here as well as in the thoughtful and sometimes almost prosaic suggestions in the design strategies film such as and I quote designing objects with more intuitive connectors or clamping systems which would enable a more precise separation of materials and more efficient recycling is and I quote is the image of a designer as the designer of the possible able to revalue what is smart and what is dumb what is waste and what is efficient. A counterpoint to this is to this incredibly ambitious vision and it's kind of more modest counterpart are the design objects themselves which I would love to hear more about today since what all of us have been doing for today's lecture is pour over the films. These objects they seem intentionally rarified and restrained as critical objects. They're nothing like the kind of design for the 90 percent objects that one might encounter in an exhibition at say the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. These desks and tables are not designed to change the world. Let's put it that way. Rather they seem to engage with the immediate context of the high end showroom that they seem to so comfortably belong to in order to illustrate the very absurdity of the position within their being asked to perform. So I wanted to close with this image of the film which filled us with despair in a kind of anti technological sublime to modify historian David Nye's term because it shows an image of entropy. The image of the designer architect is sometimes hopefully described as someone who miraculously combats entropy by giving order to the world. But what this image shows is that matter is always preserved to increase organized organization in one part of the system. You must decrease it in another. Every design is therefore simultaneously a design of a whole somewhere else in the globe. Your work seems to call on us to acknowledge that as architects. We design cavities as much as we design objects and the more awareness of this the better designers we become the better our planetary dental hygiene to complete the metaphor. Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me and thank you for the introduction. So today I'm going to introduce you or streams and I think in order to understand really the body of work I'm introducing it's important that I frame it in the context of its commission. As it was mentioned by Oscar it was a project commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne Australia which is a museum and the Trinale in Milan by Paula Antonelli's and your curator of the MoMA. But the initial requests came from the National Gallery of Victoria who came to us the curatorial team because they were interested in our research approach. Nevertheless, and these connect back to what you were mentioning regarding the objects, they gave us in a way a very open brief but we had to conclude it with a series of furniture pieces. This because the National Gallery of Victoria have a policy of acquiring in their collection only furniture pieces and this has a lot about the way design is still conceived even in public institutions. And nevertheless because we understood the limitations but also the possibility of the commission and we felt the institution also understood our way of working we accepted their possibilities knowing that no matter what we should have concluded with a series of furniture pieces. I thought it was probably relevant today to do not show only the conclusions of the work but also where we started from because when we are approached to design studio with such a sort of vague commission what we do is always questioning of course what we are interested as designers and also in which way we can apply design within a public institution. And what we thought was interesting about Australia is that it is one of the few first world countries which has the economy still largely based on the extraction of minerals. So the initial starting point for us as a studio since we have always been interested in the complex relationship between design, the extraction of resources and the transformation to desirable products and interaction with the environment we thought this could be an important or interesting starting point specifically the extraction of minerals from the underground. And in the presentation today I include this picture of the Willamette meteorite which is an iron nickel meteorite conserved at the National History Museum in New York and was found at the beginning of the 20th century. We love this picture because it shows a great naivete and we love to see this young kid sit on top of a gigantic meteorite. Nevertheless it also at least for us implicitly refer to the late veneer hypothesis which says that basically the minerals we are actually mining in this moment came to exist in the planet not because they are native to planet Earth but because the rays of meteorites crashed against the planets and imported a layer thick of precious metals between others gold that veneered the planet and we are actually still mining. Somehow we feel that this extraterrestrial origins of metals somehow gives almost an existential quality of the way we interact with the planet for production. We also looked into the development of knowledge of mining and this is an illustration of Georgius Agricola who was a German writer who in the beginning of the 16th century started writing several books and the mid-16th century published Dere Metallica which was the first book that largely in a very precise way analyzed the mining industry and he was also the first person that mentioned the ecological implications of the mining industry and also the dangers for the laborer. We of course couldn't skip the observations, the ecological impact of mining and the notion of conflict minerals which I guess you are all familiar with basically are those minerals that are extracted for the productions of our phones or computers and so on that because of their extraction they are causing armed conflicts in specific areas of the planet. We also looked into the economy and how to structure the economy of metal refinement and these pictures for instance are from the London metal exchange where the prices of all ferrous metals are actually decided daily. But the moment in which this sort of very broad and in a way generic analysis of the mining industry became much more focused on electronic waste was when we read a post on a business of mining which is a blog dedicated to people interested in the economy around mining. They stated that although the global demand for metals continue to increase the demand for mine supply actually starts to decrease slowly with mining only accounted for 30-40% of the total supply in 2018 versus the 50-80% in the current situation. I mean we will never know how it will be in 2018 nevertheless a trend is clear and I had a chance to also confirm this trend when we started engaging conversation with a variety of practitioners connected to the recycling of metals. Specifically we decided to focus on electronic waste for several reasons. The first one is that in this moment electronic waste is the fastest growing stream of waste globally which means that of course it is not the largest but it's the one growing very quickly and also because we as designers we feel that our practice is tremendously shaped by digital tools and we thought it was in a way very interesting to focus on the same object that allows even this research to happen to investigate really what it means to recycle electronics. I'm sure you are all familiar with the fact that the main driving force behind the recycling of electronics is the presence of precious metals contained in circuit boards and you're also I'm sure very familiar with some of these pictures and we decided to include them despite their very known of the dumping ground in Ghana or the recycling in poor working conditions and regions of China. Not because we wanted to not because we feel they are particularly relevant today but because they were relevant for the first Basel Convention of 89 where the majority of countries of the world felt that it was time to legislate on how electronic waste is handled after a public outcry seeing those pictures in the journalistic reports. The Basel Convention was signed by a lot of countries of the world, the majority of countries in the world and state that countries had to stop the exportations of electronic waste out of their own countries and to handle it internally. Nevertheless we all know that when conventions like these are signed they are basically just a list of very good intentions and it took years before this became actually enforced as law at least in the European Union. For instance, Jim Packett who is part of the Basel Action Network which is based in Seattle he developed with MIT a sort of a GPS system that plugged in in discarded electronics could prove how in the United States a lot of these products are still shaped abroad to be recycled in poor working conditions both for the laborer and dangerous for the environment. But in the process of research and it was clear for us in this moment that what we were interested was in understanding if we as designers could do something to come up with these strategies to better design electronics products for first repair in second place recycling we had to structure our research at least in three big chunks. The first one is analyzing how the former recycling system works the informal recycling system and legislation so the governance of electronic waste. Of course in our investigation we want to include also the voices of producers but they were the one that was the least interested in engaging in conversation with us. Apart from Fujik Xerox which was the only producer that responded to our request and hosted us in Thailand in Bangkok to see the recycling facilities. Their business model we think it is quite avant-garde in the sense that you have to know that when we discard an electronic product what happened is that it ends up in the recycling facilities and the object even if components are still intact and working it is shredded to recuperate materials out of it. Fujik Xerox because they have a business-to-business model they recuperate the printers and they own their recycling facilities the components are dismantled and recuperated five times before they are then later shredded to produce again raw materials. And we engage in conversation because for us it was very much important that the research we're conducting was becoming more of a form of applied research. We spoke with recyclers dealing with cooling devices with small electric appliances and with digital devices just to clarify electronic ways is any object that has an electric cable a plug or a battery so not only computers or tablets and so on. And with NGOs establishing responsible recycling workshops in countries such as India and in some regions of Africa. Regarding the governance instead we spoke with several practitioners but between others the most useful for our research were definitely the European Electronic Recycling Association and research at the United Nations University and Interpol because international police is also responsible of creating directives that are then delivered to the European Union that then creates other directives for the different countries to be translated in loads. One of the things that was very complex of the research process of Orestream was to be able when we were engaging in conversation to somehow obtain the information that was useful for our design process. As I stated before our aim was really to understand if we could come up with a series of strategies to design better electronic products and a tool we developed to converse especially with the recyclers where two videos a disassembling and a form of taxonomy where we disassembled a series of electronic products and we systematically presented in this way so that we could more specifically speak about singular components within electronics. Recyclers tend to be very proud of what they do and they have difficulties in often in understanding what we were looking for and these tools helped us in the conversation. The aim of and the results of all this conversation were visualized in a 3D rendering animation and we thought of using the medium of 3D rendering because of course that's the tool that industrial designers use the most to visualize possible products and in this case instead we are visualizing strategies for design. So if you can please play the first video. I will speak over it so the video usually has a voiceover but I would just mention some of the strategies that we have been putting forward. Our aim here was not really to be disruptive with the present industry but rather to understand what is possible to do right now with the limitations of the industry. For instance one of the things we came to realize quite quickly is that of course as you I guess you're all familiar the majority of producers of electronics do not want citizens to be able to access their products so in terms of repairing it is very much important to be able to take apart components and be able to substitute them. For this reason we are advocating for the introduction of a uniform universal screen system which could be of course definitely applied and would also have recyclers when in the case they are living in countries that have less tools or technologies available. So as you see with this example we are not trying to the sort of the our attitude is very pragmatic and very simple still our strategies could be applied today. The selections of materials of course are very much important. Miniaturizing of components is becoming more and more problematic because of course glue is used to save space and glue of course is becoming a problem because components cannot be taken apart and I will give you also an example for instance in washing machines we got to learn that the concrete weight which is used to stabilize washing machines often contains iron also to make it more heavy but then eddy current which is based on magnetic fields is used to separate ferrous and non-ferrous materials and then the concrete weight ends up contaminating the wrong stream of waste or the top of washing machine is using often particles wood but then when it is immersed in water it absorbs water and it sinks together with ferrous metals changing these materials will help the recycling process. I think there is also a huge problem with labeling for instance when you open electronic products there is not correct labeling the state what is hazardous and what is not and of course this is a problem case you want to personally adjust your own products but also if you are a laborer working in developing countries often it is a case you are not trained and so you end up maybe handling in the non-correct way and it is dangerous both for you and for the environment so any labels we just solve or not solve but at least address this this problem. Color it seems a very inoffensive element of design can also become a problem. Electric cables are often coated in black rubber but black rubber is very difficult to be recognized by visual detectors so when electric cables covered in black are shredded then coppers end up in the wrong stream of waste so changing color would help the recycling of copper cables and color would also be a good tool to be applied since visual detectors are used for the separations of components to create a clear color coding to separate the different components in the process of recycling. Of course in the animations we listed a lot of others strategies but these were just if you just mentioned the way we operated with it but as you know we as I mentioned in the beginning the interest of the museum was not only to show a research process but it was also to have a series of furniture pieces and we thought that there was in any case an interesting request since objects can be in the context of an exhibition works as a good tool to having the audience engage with more complex topics but when we had to decide which kind of furniture to design we decided to focus on office furniture or at least to reference office furniture because we feel there is a common ground or similar attitude in the way the environment is apparently efficiently divided in subcategories of values and it is mined materials are extracted refined and circulated in an almost perfect system and in the way the office has been designed at the end of the sixties I think specifically at the cubicle where it is again about efficiency of and productivity and divisions and partitions of different elements of the workforce. The office is also the place where all the bureaucracies that are compiled to make good travels in the world are being compiled. At the National Gallery of Victoria the objects and the videos were presented together where we had selections of the interviews we conducted the animations with the possible strategies and the objects which were produced with recycled metals but also included slightly grotesque elements that were rendering them apparently at first sight inoffensive and slightly more disturbing when looked closer to them and we also plated some elements in gold sourcing it from recycled circuit boards. When we presented the work at the Triennale Milan we in broken nature we decided to extend the work but focusing more on the videos than in the objects and we added elements we thought were missing in the first presentation. For instance this was a video using discarded electronics still functioning displaying small clips that was clearly explaining what happened to a product when it is discarded basically it was an infographic. And a short movie describing a very condensed history of plant obsolescence started with the feeble cartel and the limitations of lifespan of electric bulbs. For a presentation there we also decided to include what we call the visual essay because we feel that the order streams became this very focused and almost narrow investigations into electronic waste. Nevertheless our intentions as a studio when we started the project was much more to question the design industry more at large and we thought that with a more I would say almost abstract document we could address it on a more efficient way and as part of the conclusions of my presentation I would like to play the second clip which is a short extract from the movie which is 20 minutes long. Personal computers and mobile phones but also through domestic appliances products like refrigerators washing machines and ovens were once prized for their longevity and reliable performance but manufacturers now fit them with digital interfaces and computer chips that require constant software and hardware updates and to meet these demands an increasing amount of gold silver and precious minerals are being excavated from the earth of developing countries ending up in printed circuit boards and smart appliances. This demand has grown so colossal that the mining industry itself has been fundamentally altered. Mining no longer takes place underneath the surface of the planet but also above ground. The majority of the planet's metal is migrating from ores found deep in the earth's mantle to ingots stored in private warehouses or components embedded in building materials furniture appliances and exponentially multiplying electronic products. In turn these metals also accumulate in electronic waste the fastest growing waste stream on earth. This abundance in waste has created a new industry of material recuperation whose complexity increases in step with the technological sophistication of the discarded products. These objects are disassembled and recycled into metaphorical rivers of ore which stream freely across the surface of the planet as if through a continuous borderless continent. New logistical infrastructures technologies and international alliances are forged to facilitate the recirculation of metals at the lowest cost. Antiquated colonial topographies assert themselves once more through an economic landscape of waste disposal and re-mining. The engine of this system is not well chartered or easy to visualize but its effects occasionally manifest in poignant ironies. In the Congo new cavities are excavated for gold while the fields are covered with discarded electronics. As the sources of what Jason W. Moore has called cheap nature developing countries are exploited twice first for raw materials and second for dumping grounds 2018. Nearly 30 years after the adoption of an international convention on the transboundary movements of hazardous wastes only 30 percent of the electronic devices purchased in the western world end up in the appropriate recycling facilities. The remaining 70 percent is shipped abroad often illegally and recycled using inefficient and harmful processes that leave toxic components in the ground and create poisonous work conditions for laborers. A few countries are beginning to ban such irresponsible exportation out of their borders and creating legislature to enforce appropriate recycling channels. However the issue is almost exclusively tackled through the post hoc instrument of law but the problem can also be understood as a question of design. A potential for change that has been largely ignored not only by lawmakers but equally by designers and engineers. While they focus only on the retooling and miniaturization of electronic components they remain ignorant of the complications they are creating for the recycling process. Consumers are kept passive lacking the required knowledge or tools to understand and influence the system. Their electronic purchases are distributed without assembly guides and standardized screws and connectors are substituted with customized components to prevent tinkering and repair. Some alternatives have been tested. First launched in 2013 the fare phone is manufactured under fair labor conditions without the use of conflict minerals and uses modules that can be repaired and upgraded separately. Meanwhile Fuji Xerox has set up their own recycling facilities to recuperate printer components up to five times before they are shredded in order to be processed into raw materials. Recycling is an important action but it is a short-term solution. Inevitably the relation between production consumption and disposal must be drastically reformed based on a new definition of the metric of efficiency. Waste in fact is no more than a theoretical construct within a hyper capitalist value system. There is no objective distinction between a new shiny product and unwanted trash nor any real separation between technological device and human body. Matter is in a state of constant flux. Our bodies deteriorate and decompose feeding the growth of other organisms. Matter bonds separates and transforms. It never appears out of nothing nor disappears into nothing. Design can play a role. It is not just about shaping materials but investigating and guiding what happens before that moment and from that point onwards. It can be a tool to limit and heal the damage caused by its needs rather than a mechanism to invent new desires and immediately frustrate them. As Tim Ingold says materials do not exist rather as substances in becoming they carry on or procure forever overtaking the formal destinations that at one time or other have been assigned to them and undergoing continual modulation as they do so. Left to themselves however materials can run amok. Pots are smashed. Bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to keep things intact whether they be pots or people. So I thought of showing this clip also because for us the video was also an occasion to almost making collide all the different elements of the research and the furniture we used which they became almost props in the in the in the video and to address as I mentioned before some of the issues we're looking into from a more holistic perspective and as a conclusion also of the commissions that we got from the Trinale Milan we thought it was important to use part of their budget available to do a website which is called AuraStreams.com which is structured in three very simple pages an intro AuraStream which is where we collected all the outcomes such as interviews of videos the objects etc and an archive which is collecting selections of the documents and things we have been reading to investigate electronic waste for us this is a way to make it also available for others and it has a very simple tax system to divide the different contents. Thank you. Thank you so much Simone. Now I had a whole lot of questions I wanted to ask but I scrapped them because you somehow answered them. Now of course it's always smart to say that because if the question that I end up asking is a bad question then everyone will say hey he he came up with it on the spot but if it turns out to be a good one people will say wow I can't believe he came up with that so I wanted to just come back to your quote which which I quoted once and then which reappears in the end of the film where it where you state where you talk quite kind of earnestly about what design what what role design can play and I thought maybe I would just kind of go back to that for one for one last time and I wanted to start by saying that you know I love this quote as much as I do the work but I can't help but find attention within it as I do within the work you know there's such a wide range that you seem to be proposing here from the kind of the icy commentary of the objects themselves to the kind of the more minute improvements to reuse and recycling that you kind of go through and in the in the film and in the lecture but then I guess my question is how far up can you go because if you go all the way up the line then it seems that what you're potentially proposing is something like a planned economy and am I right I mean this this aspect that that kind of every aspect of the design process could somehow be controlled and that you know somehow the price of for example the object's disposal will somehow be incorporated into the price of the object no so so and and you know and then I realized that you know this is probably not precisely what you're proposing and that that and it kind of made me think about the film you know the recent series Journal Beal I don't know if anyone has seen that have you seen it I've seen the first episode but I mean even if you haven't seen it I mean we don't need to see it because it it happened you know so and what was very interested in that show and you know this is great because this is happening also in the within the context of a planned economy where the great thing about this is that you know no one really seems to know the relationship between one thing and the next because of that that's where the kind of the the whole thing explodes because and what what you seem to be proposing is that the designers should be able to kind of step into each each spot along the process somehow into the process of extraction into the process of recycling into the process of reuse into the and into the process of legislation and that that is kind of what you're laying on the table here I mean and I'm wondering where do you think so first of all I think it is important as designers we are more aware of that at least so I think what we find problematic of the discipline is that somehow we are often asked to step in in the process and to accept how the great that you're working in it has been designed and for us a project like or streams is a way of investigating where resources are coming from where they are going and where design play a role so I think the work is more or less trying to problematize the position of design more than anything else one of the elements that we think is unresolved of the work one of the various elements are resolved is of course that in this moment for instance we decided to focus on recycling which we are very much aware that recycling as it's another industry it's simply like a fragment of a very complex economic structure that we are not undermining of course if we take care of recycling nevertheless we believe that design can intervene on multiple levels and also there are different kinds of audiences in a way so when you observe for instance electronic waste and how it is managed there is an urgency to make that industry more responsible for instance and I think that's what we were trying to do with or streams let's say that we when we started looking into it it was so evident that a certain kind of thinking wasn't in place and that there's a lack of communications for instance between engineering teams designers, producers, recyclers and lawmakers that there is an evident space for improvement there and it's what we were trying to do with or streams despite as a project it speaks much more to designers than to lawmakers for instance so also how the project is conceived in terms of its visual language and instead it communicates to a very specific group of people and I think that is something we should improve to also think about how where the work can travel beyond ourselves and beyond the public that we're speaking to I mean I think it was fascinating to learn that I don't think I had the kind of the timeline correct in my head so I think I thought it was to me what viewing the kind of the main what do you what do you call it film essay or whatever you call it I mean there it seems like the whole project is almost there from the start it's very interesting to hear that it starts with the objects that almost seem like they kind of stretch out there's like a space that's stretched out between the objects on the one hand and let's say the archive that you that you give us on the website that seems to be like on the one hand a kind of a very very practical kind of set of tools and a very kind of critical commentary let's say something like that and in between that there's kind of a spectrum of things that you're trying to make available yes indeed I think that in a way it is a for us this was a very important body of work but it was it is also very unresolved body of work in the sense that it is the first time that we are really trying to shift a design studio and to more pragmatically let's say have an agenda in this case was really to observe an industry first and to understand if there are changes we can suggest but still the project has different attitudes different ways of operating also because of how he was framed by the commissioner so it maybe an interesting aspect of the work is that it has all the complexities and the problematics but also the possibilities of the design discipline in this moment how it is framed by institutions how it is conceived by the market and we will have to see how as a design studio we can take this forward for instance we are working on something right now which is a closer observation to the timber industry and definitely at least in the first installment we will not present any product and it will become much more just simply the display of a research process one of the way we see our work going forward is to also make it as part of an educational program I'm not sure I replied no that's a very no it's a great that's a great response and I was also we'll move on to Jonah soon I just one response to that was because a couple of weeks ago we saw for example Amy Siegel's work I don't know if you're familiar with that but what she was very much quick synopsis sorry is the film we watched this film called quarry and it's about the first half of the film we see a quarry and kind of marble the dumbest of materials being kind of quarried out of the ground and then on the other hand on the other half of the film we see this marble kind of miraculously reappearing in the kind of the show Manhattan showrooms but what she was very much concerned with was kind of saying doing something a little bit similar to what you just said which was like not kind of critiquing or kind of exposing a process but more like almost performing the process or something like that you know as if as if you couldn't go outside of the kind of the art art market system but somehow making the work kind of speak that language but I I was wondering how your work related to that and I feel like you you kind of are able to do somehow both you know this is not meant as a critique to Amy's work but but that there is like there is both the kind of the way that the objects in this in the in the exhibition they kind of perform this kind of this kind of institutional critique but at the same time there's a also quite earnest attempt to the objects are the most complex things there because they are very also ambiguous by nature because the announcement to illustrate the proposals we put in place but they are actually more reflecting on some of the things we have been looking to from an aesthetic perspective so the questions were much more let's say almost formal and slowly a bit more less pragmatic we had a completely less pragmatic approach and we let ourselves definitely be guided by the physicalities of materials also and their grotesque like what you said yeah I mean I thought that was a pretty great word yeah I think a lot of people don't see them as grotesque they just see them as very beautiful but that doesn't matter at least I think they always have this feeling of let's say that what we were striving for is to have these objects which they look and they perform as perfect objects with these shiny pretty surfaces we when we had to decide the colors for instance we look at the palette of colors of macarons we really wanted to have something very banal in its prettiness and then adding other elements which are sort of weird or apparently weird but they bind them together in an arithеu which is a bit more complex and a bit they reference back to that thing that the reference to Tim McGill engulfed at the end of the movie where it says that basically materials are in constant transformation and you don't really know what you're looking at really when you look at the objects nevertheless when they are presented together with a body of work like this they become I guess a bit problematic I would almost say it would be better to present the objects and the other work they're separated elements but we never had enough space to sort of divide them because I think they do different things which is probably one of the critique I have of the work today we do too many things all together but being all over the place is also a good way to start thank you so I guess the question that I'd like to ask is on some level a kind of meta critique so I'll just launch into it I mentioned before we started a book by the architectural historian Daniel Ambrimson called Obsolescence in Architectural History which I made available to some of students in my group but I'll just cite in the last chapter which is called Sustainability and Beyond he asks the kind of larger scale question what meanings from the history of obsolescence can be applied to efforts at sustainability today so the the book is about obsolescence in general in the history of architecture mostly in the 20th century but the thesis of the last chapter is basically that sustainability has made the paradigm of obsolescence itself obsolete and so he asks he argues that through the concept of obsolescence and I'll quote here hazard was tamed contingency made manageable even profitable and in today's world the rhetoric of sustainability has supplanted obsolescence by quote offering slow adaptability and circular conservation but also demonstrating sustainability to be a tool of capital that is it's inherently conservative and he writes depending upon machine and managerial innovations to equilibrate equilibrate change green engines and preservation protocols at the same time sustainability is promoted as an economic growth machine to support capitalist accumulation so applying that critique to your work um I would just sort of I guess it caused me to reflect upon the the the sort of propositions that you proffer specifically in the design strategies video which is a collection of should statements legislation should be made to do this we should do this we should do this next thing right and the so the question that I'm that I'm sort of aiming at here is it seems as though there's a kind of accommodation that in the entire body of work that you asked us to to watch there's a notion that we're going to continue to produce this waste so how can we mitigate the damage that it that that it somehow will be its byproduct right whereas I guess my question is wouldn't there be a more radical proposition that would force us to question and change our behaviors in other words despite the best of intentions that you might be actually enabling a maintenance of the status quo the behaviors that we've grown a test into yeah indeed I when we decided to put forward those proposals for the recycling of products we were sounding from the awareness that as I mentioned before even recycling itself is a part of an economic system and it's just like even a concept itself of waste is the outcome of the capitalist system that says like this is value and this is not value nevertheless there are things that needs to to be addressed sort of now and things that needs to be addressed today in the afternoon and I think the work is not is not doing what it's not doing is proposing a total transformation of the way design is applied but also the way economy is conceived I do agree that sustainability as a concept has been totally assimilated by the way we conceived economy today and new more radical way of thinking must arise I think we hint to that at the end of of the video we presented before but it's yet not out there our own proposal nevertheless I think inevitably the only way to have a radical change is of course the thinking of a completely different economic system and while of course the designer I don't have the ability to do that we hope in the future as a design studio to to be more radical in that respect for instance I was mentioning before in this moment we are working on a project that is about at least in this stage it's a form of observation of the timber industry which means everything and nothing when I say timber industry but nevertheless basically the sourcing of materials from a forest for the productions of timber there are some ethical questions that arise for instance from the fact that you're dealing with a living species a tree that would probably help us to move forward to a more sort of a radical perspective in how to conceive which is impossible to have a less anthropocentric perspective of design which I'm saying it's impossible because of course by nature design is anthropocentric it's the most anthropocentric discipline existing on the planet but it's what we are striving as a design studio but we don't have of course any solution yet and I'm not sure we will have solutions but that's what we're interested to investigate in the near future maybe we could take questions from the audience I wanted to ask you about how important as a designer is it to show the context like to make it visible the context like I've seen the in the foundation Cartier the object and the volcano the furniture made from the volcano in Milan I was wondering if it was important the context yeah yeah well for us it is definitely important in the sense that no matter what we do there is a context for it and when we produce things they come from a place they originate in a place they relate to it and I think that's the most interesting part in a design discipline in this moment is to actually look much more on a contextual level how we operate as designers and also where we source materials maybe it is just we are pretty obsessed with it but it's just that we think it is where the most interesting of radical changes could happen if you closely observe to a context from where something originate I think for a long time as designers we operated almost in a vacuum you know I think probably it is due to the fact that designers always operated the parting from an idea that we are supposed to serve human needs and human needs then became a synonymous of desires and if my role is fulfilling those needs I don't necessarily I can also overlook how I get there basically it might be an oversimplification but I think that's often what is happening also as designers we often operate based on specific commissions that are not asking us to be critical of the context where we operate and I find that problematic that's also why as a design studio we are trying to more and more to establish our discipline between more and more commercial practice and more let's say research based and a more critical one because we see that it's the merging of the two is sadly almost impossible and so the only way to operate in this moment is probably to radicalize the two positions so to work commercially and to work completely non-commercial almost radical on a radical level I don't know where that will lead us but I think rarely a good connections between the the two parts seems to happen in this moment we we saw that the furniture that you design is also available for at least on the site it's available for for you to buy it so is this something that what you said now trying to to assemble this kind of critical thinking with the commercial side of practice and or and what these how do you see like the commercialization of this furniture that itself has a political agenda do you see it the act of putting it for sale as well as a political agenda and also if it is for sale is it just the object that was on the display or is it like made to order or produce yeah so the objects are available through a gallery so they are sold as like art objects basically that's how it is basically we we accept the fact that they are a commodity and they have different forms they have different nature and our work have different way of operating nevertheless when we conceive the object that's not absolutely what we were thinking so this example is not of the orchestra's work isn't anything like what I just said in a sense that it was originated from a mission from a museum it was supposed to stay like that and then it became a larger addition of objects which is sold basically as art pieces but it was definitely not part of our agenda or part of our aim when we started the work the work as I explained started as a commission that we sort of twisted in a way that was interesting for the studio and the objects were an occasion to respond to a commission but at the same time to look on an aesthetic level how to address some of the things we were talking about with the rest of the work Hi we have heard a lot about recycling and some would argue that the recycling industry is a millionaire industry is that sorry a millionaire industry what do you think about reducing the use of electronic devices rather than only recycling or reusing yeah so the part of the there is a part in the animation that I mentioned before that is also addressing the needs of repair which it comes first actually the right of repair that it comes first the recycling interestingly if what you need to well repair something is almost the same things you need to well recycle something so they share similar the repair necessities shares very similar elements to the recycling one the reason why we focus more extensively in the recycling and I agree with you it is a millionaire industry is because specifically also with electronic waste there's a lot of things that needs to be done not really to be more efficient but at least to be more responsible so in this moment there's still materials that are exported in the same developing countries where minerals are extracted and also because in any case no matter intellectually how we see economy developing at least you are going to mine less from the underground if recycling is becoming more and more efficient is this solution not repairing is definitely the first step that should be there and we addressed it at the beginning of the animation once we extended it for the triennale in Milan because we were aware that was a very vital an important element also because it is the best way to challenge also how companies establish their own business model which is of course it is still based on obsolescence and not for instance on repair which is a completely different idea I guess so one of the questions that remains for me out of all of this is it seems to me that there are two well the larger question is how do you address ethics in in the kind of of in your production and so what I mean by that is that it seems as though there's a kind of unreconciled tension here between on the one hand your kind of ecumenicism towards what counts what is waste what counts as a valued object the constructiveness or contingency of values right so this would be you know the that that you know the Tim Ingold that what we understand to be waste is contingent on our you know the shiny object doesn't have inherent value in itself all of those that line of thinking on the other hand you also emphasize this question the kind of the imperative towards what Alex was asking about in terms of efficiency repair that these are things that we need to do right and embedded in that idea of efficiency is a set of values right that that let's say is anything but contingent right so I guess I just wonder how you pull those two concepts together yeah well I'm not sure if we pull them together and I realize that there is the attention there but we haven't been able to find another way of operating or it's almost as if we see that there are different scales in times of intervention almost and there are sort of things that I don't see it I see there's no other way than addressing them according to the present system and then parallel to that there should be sort of efforts in coming up with alternatives to it do you know what I mean like I don't see that we can I don't see ourself as a design studio but also as a practice I don't see design sort of being the ultimate discipline that can disrupt completely a system it can observe it it can criticize it but at the same time sort of react to it still yeah I guess what I hear you describing is a kind of tension on some level maybe between kind of conceptual reconciliation that maybe isn't necessary to perform when in fact what your what you see as your mandate is really just to kind of practice yes be fair yeah I think it's fair I think it's fair hi my question is do you think recycling especially in architecture is always the best solution I mean for example in Europe or in Milan sometimes buildings become obsolete right and it has maybe a higher cost with the environment to just preserve them or recycle them instead of turning them in a part so I was thinking what is your position in recycling in architecture I mean of course I'm not in architecture so I I'm not really aware of it but nevertheless I think that there's multiple ways that a building can be recycled I think that I do like the idea that humans adapt to a building more than buildings adapting to humans what I mean to say is that I think there's a lot of attempt in or there's a lot of people that thinks that the only way is sort of disrupting sound or destroying completely something to start the new and I I think the humans have so much ability to adapt to a context that I don't see even in architecture that as a huge necessity then in terms of what is best for the environment I guess it depends on the singular case studies I mean honestly there's I don't know any rule that is applyable equally throughout different systems so hi thank you for your presentation for me was very impressive to understand from the video visual essay that a small daily use object is connected to different regions ways of extraction production and local communities so every object is very loaded with amounts of information that we rarely see and we are not even conscious do you think technology and design should be improving everybody's quality of life but is this really happening or finally there is a giant discrimination in destruction production consumption cycle from who is being benefited and who is not do you think this is related to power or money what do you suggest should happen among politics and economy spheres to revert this and finally regarding to your to a designer's practice what ethic measures should we as designers pursue when designing so I think I will have to ask you to repeat the questions one by one and I'm sure I will not sort out the problems of humanity today but nevertheless I think that let me think I think I forgot half of your questions you asked the first question was was that in the in the cycle of extraction production and consumption not everybody in the start in this cycle is being benefited so do you think there's like a correlation definitely I mean honestly I still find bizarre when people still talk about democratic design because of course we know design is democratic for a limited a group of people we I still do think that design is about improving the life of people I think it's not enough anymore I think it should be about humans and other species too and I think that would be the biggest challenge forward I think design has placed the needs of humans at the center basically forever and in this respect that's probably the most critical point of design if you think about even the charts of how in a lot of famous design educations you know the humans always place at the center and then design as a as a discipline that reacts to the needs of humans but in a moment like this one where the ecological disaster is upon us it is already happening how can we still talking only about the well-being of humans for instance when we know that the main idea of ecology is that there is an entanglement between species that is vital for survival on the planet so this is another element that should be reformed within design discipline I'm not sure we will be the one doing that but it is it is definitely to be considered and of course well your question was also about who is responsible for this right do you or or I think you answered me the but for example we as designers what kind of ethics should we pursue when we are designing for example what commissions we doing it to take and which ones for example doing it to reject good question very good questions we really we really struggle with the ethical components of our own practice but it's also the things we like the most also because it make it we are faced daily with the what we are willing to do and not as also as individuals we always feel me and ready we have more responsibilities as designers than singular human beings that I know it seems a paradox but we feel a bit like those doctors that of course it should suggest people not to smoke if your patient is suffering or cancer but maybe they are still smoking when they are home sometimes we do feel like that I mean I think there is a higher responsibility when you practice your own discipline and I don't know which are the set of ethics you should apply in your own work I think it is up to you honestly I think that and the we came to term for instance in our own studio on how we handle that more or less which is like looking at the economy of the studio how much we are able to pay the people in the studio and limiting as much as possible the internships or making sure they are a bit paid and what do I need to do that to pay that for instance it's just a simple this is some of the questions that are happening within the studio and then there are the ethical questions when you address a work but inevitably I don't have I don't have an answer because I think you should come out with your own sort of ethical questions I guess in any case the way we structure our own practice is a lot about investigating which are the limits and the responsibility of the discipline and I'm saying limits because since we operate not in an academic context but we have a design studio we also face to do honestly some pretty stupid works and even there when we do these stupid works we try to at least have at least a conversation with the commissioners or try to rethink the commission they propose us and so on or to redirect the economy that comes out of that of that commission for the studio itself hello can you hear me yes thank you I don't know the limits of your practice so I'm only responding to the or streams it's just a question like who do you imagine is the audience of your work and how does that relate to the forms of representation that you that you used yeah so since the work was commissioned from a public institution museum that was interested in in displaying the work within an exhibition of course the design related audience was the people were speaking to nevertheless honestly and I know this will probably sounds very selfish but we always consider ourselves a domain audience now because we are so arrogant that we like to say now we're studio and designing for us but because we hope that we find something interesting for us and it communicates to us what we want to do it will also do to others we are aware that for instance with the or streams we did an effort for instance in documenting the interviews we conducted and we try to collect more precisely with a bit more rigor the research we've done to possibly make it available to a larger group of people and I think this will become more and more part of our work which is developing work in such a way that reflects our own practice but at the same time produce a research which can be distributed or at least made available to a larger group one of the things we are doing for instance in this moment is drafting a more simple document think like a simple PDF to give back to the people we have been interrogating with some of the questions we had in the process of research because we realize that they find sort of the visual presentation of putting in the sense that whatever they see something pretty they think it's not serious so we will have to degrade the quality of our designs to make sure we will listen Hi Good afternoon I wanted to ask you about I didn't see you Oh, I'm here I know that you give lessons in university and I was my question is more regarding the education of these like being conscious about these topics so how do you think institutions should educate students and how also students should be educated on these topics So we are involved with different educations in Aindhoven Design Academy but teachers within other departments and from next 2020 we will also have our own department and in CECILEO we started a bachelor program for the local students that cannot afford to travel abroad out of CECILEO to study I think that what actually it is missing in the design discipline in this moment is the observation of not only the power but also the limitations and the programatics of the design discipline in itself what I mean to say is there's a lot of lecture series and programs that sort of promote the amazing things that I can do that on the other side I think it is also important to focus on the terrible things design can do and the establish an education course which would help students to create a much more to grow a much more critical perspective towards how they operate and to help them developing a set of ethical references for their own practice at least this is something we will try to do when we establish our own departments in Aindhoven and yes that's it Hi mine is more like a comment I really like when you say in the video say developing countries are exploited twice for the raw materials and the waste and I wanted to add maybe one more with a third because in developing countries the access for repair it is more difficult so like what I say like manufacturers should warranty the possibility of repair so these developing countries are exploited three times because we don't have the access for repair so then that is the waste I have to say honestly I think repairing is happening much more in I mean I hate to use developing countries as a word but that's the one I use because they honestly their components are reused much more and they are not just shredded often at least not always to recuperate raw materials at least for in the case of electronics but yes I agree with you and also something that it was very banal and obvious but what I thought was interesting is when I was looking into with Andrea into the the problematics of recycling it is absolutely obvious how the products are conceived to be sold globally but are designed keeping in mind the very specific local context of based on wealth and privilege and it was also very interesting in any case that if you start observing something very close and you apply certain sort of more critical prospecting into a problem you realize that if you design something very well for repair you will sort of sort out a lot of troubles also for recycling which I thought that was particularly interesting what I mean to say is that there is a lot of improvement that can be done in how things are designed as long as we abandon a cliche idea of what innovation is and innovation is the first tool for the bus of the economy and at the end of the day because it is used as a way as a tool to create new things basically constantly but the the idea of innovation is also based on a very old fashioned concept which is much closer to what what what we all as consumers thinks we want I mean how many pixels do we need a camera to have do you know what I mean I find it hilarious our eye cannot even see that resolution anymore what do we do with that and I find this is incredibly interesting that we're all buying in this concept of innovation for instance where electronics are becoming thinner and thinner and I'm wondering where they are they supposed to go why is it thinner better if than you cannot separate components if I cannot access it so I think it is also interesting to see how even on an aesthetic level there are some concepts that are completely bizarrely there because they serve an economic paradigm more than anything else hello yeah so I found your work very interesting I found it a little apocalyptic so I just wanted to ask you if you have an optimistic view or conclusion about this research that you're doing well I don't think it was apocalyptic maybe because you've seen the videos I think we were trying to be not apocalyptic by proposing even very simple but now things that we can do now because indeed indeed it is very difficult to be a designer today and maybe that attempt to be sort of in proposing solutions in a very it's a bit of an old-fashioned modernist approach in a way it was a way to avoid to go fully apocalyptic I think also in the way we we actually I really don't agree because I think we put a lot of effort also in the visuals we use in the way we constructed the aesthetic of the work to avoid to have a glamorizing of dystopia which we really care about that because enough of that you know like enough with Black Mirror I mean the kind of I find that very problematic how the disasters upon us can be easily beautifully be represented and fulfill an idea of sublime which is I think not working anymore thank you so much for your presentation being here my question is you try to demonstrate the relationship between material and human knowledge in a way that narrates the past and the present how do you picture the future in terms of technology innovation and design the relationship between material the product and human it's a very broad question how do I vision is it a question how I vision the development of design and technology in the future us yeah you try to demonstrate material and human knowledge in your the past and now the current one so how do you as a person or doing research in this area in this in this discipline how do you picture the future of technology material and design the future of technology I don't know because I have the feeling will sort of continue in the past that it is nowadays but I hope the least the future of knowledge will develop on a much more interdisciplinary way and much more and I go back maybe to the questions about education much less I don't I think I don't believe in the idea of thinking education in terms of the way of of making a person a professional that performs in in in a specific profession and so I hope that knowledge will develop in a much more humanistic perspective of the different knowledges that come together because I think that's the probably only way to look forward even for technological development that actually makes sense because the one of the things we experienced looking to or streams and after it strangely enough not strangely actually good enough we have been connected by an electronic producers of phones and tablets and stuff like that and we thought they were interesting in the work we were developing they were totally not they were really not interested of any of the things we were talking about but it wasn't in any case an interesting thing to look into their company because it was evident how their the structure of the company is totally fragmented so that nobody that works within it can have an realistic view of the product they're actually developing and I find that a very interesting way of developing a company because it it is about splitting knowledge in little fragments so that nobody is taking responsibility or what is produced at the end basically which I think it is a very illuminating at least for us it was an illuminating experience to be able to look that up close so in a way if that respond to your questions I hope that this way of fragmenting knowledge will sort of if not come into an end but it will be less dominant in the future at least within education okay so I do agree with you that we don't need smaller phones or like 20 megapixels but is that question directed to us as consumers or to the big tech companies because you know like Apple like last year or the year before they released an update that impaired or slowed down a lot of phones so we were forced to upgrade and buy the new one so what can we do yeah I still have an iPhone 5 and somebody else in the room have an iPhone 4 so you can still handle 4s 4s it's the first person in the world I need that has a phone all that I'm mine which I'm very happy I found one so so your question was if it is a question for citizens or for producers well I guess it is a question for both I think it is a question for both yeah I think that of course for instance I think it would totally be doable to for a gigantic company like Apple to structure their business model around the idea of repair they could totally do that I'm I'm confident with that would that be a solution no but it would definitely be better how it is nowadays I think it will also be forced to do that they recently stated that their recent products will be more and more focused on being long-lasting I think it is also the outcome of pushes in legislation at least that I'm aware of in Europe for limiting the damages of plant obsolescence so I think Apple is basically stating the obvious basically when they say that because they're basically forced to address durability now but I wonder if we could sort of expand that question again to the the larger field of valuing systems which is to say I think there's a kind of notion embedded in some of these questions that says that if the product is really really well designed then it will last longer and that's a good thing and I guess I would just I wonder how we assess that kind of like better equals longer lasting again in terms of kind of larger system of values that that implies well considering how everything in this moment is based on obsolescence at least if it is not on a technological level even on aesthetic obsolescence I think necessarily in this moment durability is a disruptive concept yeah because inevitably it pushes for a complete reform of the way growth is conceived upon which is based on on limiting durability yeah I just wanted to sort of gesture towards the the idea that the oar streams project has this entire section called archive which is all about collection and you know accretion and somehow you know retaining material right material of a different sort yeah now there was a really like when we were really looking forward to do that because a lot of the things we have been doing in the studio was actually sort of looking into all these materials and we feel it is important to find a place where they can be collected yeah I was recently speaking with the journalists at the Diaz with sustainable development in companies but he was actually really passionate about his work and he was for instance mentioning how it is very difficult to find places where sort of knowledges from different sectors come together which is in a way what we were trying to do with oar streams just out of out of our own interest not as an agenda but it's becoming probably more and more of an agenda because we realize how vital that is hi we were just talking about last question last question oh we were just talking about the Apple devices for us and notice that you show your in your video you show the the videos in in all Apple devices yes I wonder whether it is like a sarcastic implication that it is on recycle or unrepairable they are all computers we have in the studio so it goes back to what we said at the beginning we thought to the focus on electronic waste at one point became also relevant for us because of how much these objects shape our practice so in a way the video is a gigantic meta work in a sense that it's about observing the work we do with the with the objects we use daily on top of the objects we designed so the the video was conceived to be like that almost like this Russian doll structure of the thing all right I think we will wrap up for today thank you so much thank you