Paola Antonelli is one of Time magazine’s 25 “most ingenious design visionaries.” She never disappoints. Her exhibitions reflect the times and are always ahead of the curve. The prolific author and prodigious researcher, who is also senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design department, expand the boundaries of design research and practice. Her exhibits challenge established norms and spark untold imaginations.
Antonelli’s current exhibit, Broken Nature, which is on view in MoMA street-level galleries through Aug. 15, 2021, addresses the innovative concept of “restorative designing” and presents objects, concepts, and strategies that help people repair relationships with the environment they live in. Antonelli’s work could be described as “activist curatorial work.” I spoke to him recently.
Your curatorial skills have allowed you to demonstrate that design is more than just flower-arranging. You have curated innovative exhibits such as Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design and Open Ends, Matter, Workspheres, and Safe: Design Takes On Risk. Broken Nature is your current boundary-pushing project. This environmental polemic reveals in the age of climate change denial how design and nature are not only co-dependent but actually integrated as we move into a temporary future. Could you please explain the idea behind this work?
All the shows you mentioned and my work together have one thing in common: design can be used to shape behavior. It is not only about making beautiful, useful, and meaningful things. Broken Nature recognizes that humans have historically possessed a large amount of control over nature, often abusing it. It is the designers’ responsibility to use their talents to create a better relationship. Although some of the human-to-planet bonds have been broken forever, others can still be restored. Design can be a tool to help us achieve this.
This exhibit seems to blur the lines between art and design (as a promising industry). At a recent MoMA design committee meeting, Liz Diller stated that you create and fill an incredible space between these two forms. Do you intend to bridge the age-old divide between fine and applied arts?
As a design curator, my job is to educate citizens about the importance of design. Design, like art, has a rightful place within culture and institutions. It also deserves our attention. I must emphasize that fact design encompasses more than objects, materials, and immaterial at every scale. You don’t have to be told that design includes many fields of study, including graphic and interactive design and speculative, visualization, and other disciplines. These languages are often shared with science, art, and anthropology. … Speculative Design, for instance, is a new way to express design that transcends traditional methods and embraces videography, philosophy, or literary fiction.
It’s a provocative title, “Broken Nature”. This title suggests that design and technology based on design may be the solution. Is design, as you define it, capable of regenerating the world?
Design alone cannot change the world, and no discipline can. Designers have the tools to collaborate with other disciplines to create a better world for all. My essay for Broken Nature started with Buckminster Fuller’s quote: “The little individual can be considered a trim tab.” This means we can change our behavior and adopt a more restorative mindset to create systemic change. Design can help us adopt these attitudes because it is a discipline that shapes or changes behavior.
It is a sculpture made from seaweed and serves as a testing ground for other materials that might aid in hum.
An ability to survive in the future. This is what makes it fit within the design umbrella.
Broken Nature explores the importance of developing new materials and processes. This is one of my main themes. Design is more than beautiful chairs, as I said. Designers must think beyond what they want to design. They also need to consider how it will be used. As designers, architects, and engineers, we are responsible for creating new building processes that counter the negative effects of decades-long overconsumption, pollution, and extraction. Oki Naganode is an excellent example of a well-executed design. It examines the benefits of using the material in different contexts and considers the material’s nature and the artisanal practices associated with it.
As you can see, I still hold conventional presumptions about the definitions of design. It limits or instead restricts what design is. How can you get so far off the limb? How do you find your subjects, then?
The premise that everything around me is designed, from our genetic makeup to the physical infrastructures and intangible infrastructures surrounding us, is the first thing I believe. The possibilities are limitless when we see the world through this lens.
You organized an exhibition called Humble Masterpieces years ago that featured, if I recall correctly, everything from paper clips to M&Ms to Bic pens. How can you balance this quotidian design and your experimentation over the past five years?
These are two sides of one coin to me. Humble Masterpieces is a show that focuses on objects that are so common and play such an integral part in our lives that we often take them for granted. This show was created to educate visitors about the importance of design in our lives. Broken Nature and other projects argue that design objects we use every day, from sunscreens to textile alternatives to sunscreen to devices that help communities access to water more easily, are key to helping us to adopt a more restorative mindset. This is as important as experiments with new materials.
You continue to acquire material that ranges from the “@” sign for an email address to the green prosthetic devices in the current exhibition that aid the body in digesting many of the proteins we have lost. Explain how graphic design can coexist in an interactive and stimulated environment.
Graphic design has been an integral part of our collection since the beginning. We have looked at it through an interactive design lens recently. Interaction design is a way to mediate our relationships with objects, both digitally and physically. It allows us to communicate with each other and with our devices. Graphic design is key to successful interactions. It has always been another way of saying “communication design”.
When you combine all the ideas, concepts, and artifacts that you have presented at MoMA and then look at what the future of design has to offer, you can determine which design is best equipped to bring about change in the coming years.
Now, I’m focusing on what it means for design to be more than just human. This is the natural progression in my work over the years and a key point for the entire design field. We must start thinking about how we can use our power, including the power of design, to benefit all species if we have a reparative approach to the planet. Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group’s Silk Pavilion are innovative examples of interspecies fabrication. It is a collaboration between humans and computers. In the next few years, I expect to see more of this kind of experimentation, focusing on how design might decenter human beings. Perhaps silkworms will be able to model our behavior and help us achieve our goals in the future rather than vice versa.
