What is the significance of merging design, art and science, and what is the best way to do this? Paola Antonelli, the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, met us on Skype to talk about the role of designers in science and society.
Portrait of Paola Antonelli.
How does curating design differ from curating art?
There are a lot of differences. My art colleagues tend to do more monographic shows that have a different approach than the thematic shows that I favour. The reason for the thematic focus might be that I have more to prove and explain. Design is currently not treated as an art in its own right and it has to fight for its own presence and relevance in culture. Another important difference is that art curators often have a lot of reverence for artists – what they say and do is considered almost a religion. Designers, on the other hand, are usually working for a client and used to being questioned and negotiated with. That makes the curating different.
Working at the intersection of design, art and science, we’d like to hear how you see the future relationship between the three.
At the time of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition we were not the first ones to make design and science meet but maybe the first ones to make a full-fledged show about it. The Royal College of Art and Wellcome Trust in London have been exploring the intersection for a long time and the interesting and beautiful thing about their approach is that nobody makes a distinction between art and design in this context. One of the things I learned when making Design and the Elastic Mind was that the disctinctions between design, art and science become insignificant when you try to come up with new ideas that haven’t been proven or that don’t have a functionality yet.
The role of art – as it is generally seen – is to question our beliefs and habits. When you want to do that with design you need to use the means of art, like many pieces in Design and the Elastic Mind did. However, at the same time, every single work in the show had a design intention and soul to it. It’s hard to say what’s the difference between art and design – and it certainly cannot be built on form. You rather have to go back to the intent of the artist or designer. An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better. Overall, I think that one of the main roles of MoMA and myself is to give people who are doing meaningful things a platform and a sense of validation.
“An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better.”
In our interview with Anthony Dunne, he said that art shouldn’t need to exist. His reason was that in an ideal, utopian world; everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need a separate category called art. “I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed,” he noted. What are your thoughts on this argument?
Haha, it’s a very extreme argument which I love and completely understand! It comes from the same militant spirit that I have here at MoMA – as representatives of design we have so much to prove. I’m very glad that Tony [Anthony Dunne] is taking this stance because we need to make more outrageous statements to make people think.
Like you write in Seed magazine, as the focus of design shifts from the production of finite goods to a practice of experimentation, ideas take precedence over products. How will this effect the role of designers?
I think this phenomenon expands the field of action for designers. Instead of being hired to manufacture products, designers might be hired to help the company think. I feel that Tony and Fiona [Dunne and Raby] are sometimes commissioned to be a thorn in the company’s side; to make them more aware of the consequences of their actions. I hope more designers will do that in the future, when people start understanding that design is not only about chairs and lamps. Designers can also work with politicians and policy-makers – many of them have the ability to be thinkers on a general level.
“I hope that more designers wiIl be hired by companies to be thorns in their sides; to make them think and be more responsible.”
We feel that the university didn’t exactly prepare us for what we’re doing now with OK Do. How do you think designers as general thinkers should be educated?
This is an interesting question because education is the most important moment for designers these days and the geography of design is completely defined by where the good design schools are and nothing else. Nowadays, many succesful design schools already lead a more holistic approach offering studies in subjects like anthropology, and sociology.
When I studied architecture in Politecnico di Milano I loved a course in technology by Professor Guido Nardi. On Tuesdays, he would talk with us about how steel, wood and other materials behave, but Fridays were dedicated to Jung, Heidegger and Adorno. In a way, there was a balance between cold and hot showers; between teachings in pure application of materials and pure abstraction of theory. I found this balance extremely important and would use the course as a model for schools today.
Nowadays, many design schools are actually focusing a lot on the theoretical side and there are so many academic design courses coming up, like design cricism, interaction design, transdisciplinary design, etc. This is great, but I also wonder if any of these students ever go to workshops and cut themselves while carving wood.
You have stated that design is a bridge between the abstraction of research and the tangible requirements of real life, and that designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. Could you mention examples of projects in which you feel design has functioned particularly well as a bridge?
There are many, of course. Designers can satisfy our human needs by making a technological innovation usable and exciting for us. The next exhibition I’m going to do at MoMA is about the communication between people and objects – it’s called Talk to Me. The first time I personally understood this concept was when I bought my first Macintosh. It was the first time I felt that I had a pet. And this is what designers really do: they make objects into something that is part of your life. In fact, nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks. That makes the interfaces of objects and the ways they interact even more important.
“Nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks.”
What kind of roles do functionality and aesthetics play in the process of translating scientific revolutions into approachable objects? What about in the end results?
Aesthetics is important as a means of communication but never by itself. There’s scientific research that says that handsome people get higher wages. It’s kind of unfair, but there is a role in our natural evolution played by beauty. On the other hand, we know very well that beauty is completely subjective and if you look at examples like Almodóvar’s movies or punk aesthetics, they might not be pretty in an obvious way, yet they are beautiful because of the personality inside.
Designers can help scientists master complexity and take advantage of new building blocks like nanotechnology for instance, but what about their ability to dream – do you think designers’ fantasies can and should get involved in scientific processes and, later, the reality?
Sometimes artists and designers and other creative professionals like science fiction writers or filmmakers inspire scientists big time and push them further, even if they don’t admit to it that much. I’m currently collaborating with a sci-fi director on a symposium about science fiction, architecture and design. We feel that almost everything that has been imagined by architects, designers and science-fiction writers in the past has actually been realised, and the question is: what could we imagine next?
What do you think is the designers’ role and responsibility in thinking about the (sometimes negative) consequences of scientific discoveries?
There’s a lot of morality in design. Sometimes moralism also, but often constructive criticism. Scientists are also very concerned with ethics and what their accomplishments are used for. I think that the more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on. Many scientists today are so different from the scientists we used to know in the past. They listen to music, they make mistakes and they think in terms of ethical responsibility.
“The more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on.”
The Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition was not concerned only with designers who have an interest in the latest scientific achievements, but also with scientists who are engaged in the act of design. Could you give us your favourite example of the latter kind of cases? And do you think it’s necessary to draw lines between professional designers and other people who practice design?
Certainly different people have different expertise and I would never put a designer in the lead of cancer research just as I wouldn’t let scientists design my mobile. It’s the communication between different fields and professionals that counts. One of my favourite works in the exhibition, ‘Colloidal Alphabet Soup’ was a new protein marker by two biologists from UCLA, Thomas Mason and Carlos Hernandez. Usually protein markers just feature different colours, but they also used the alphabet to mark the proteins in more detail. In the exhibition, they showed their work through a poster where an image of this colourful ‘alphabet soup’ was magnified. Next to their work, we exhibited a fictional piece, ‘Typosperma’ by designer Oded Ezer who had imagined that each spermatozoon of a man would have a letter attached to it with each ejaculation resulting in a new poem. The scientists were so happy to exhibit next to the designer, to not to be considered dull scientists but rather people who are creative too!
Science poems, literally speaking [haha]. So, you would say that design can produce culture, or experiences, around scientific discoveries?
Yes. A good example at Design and the Elastic Mind was a living coat called “Victimless Leather” by SymbioticA. It was made of living stem cells from mice and it had to be fed to be kept alive. It was constantly growing, finally to an extent at which I had to kill it by blocking the nutrient. I was so disturbed by having to do this and the act resulted in a big debate about killing the completely artificial yet living coat. This example demonstrates how art can take a stand in innovation and transform it into a project, it can really make you feel insecure about everything you thought we were steady and neutral about.
Victimless Leather - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific "Body", 2004. Image courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr).
In our Science Poems exhibition, we have given designers and artists the brief to explore and interpret natural sciences. What do you think is the meaning and value of letting creative professionals interpret scientific questions, processes and results?
Do you have scientists checking out your work and making sure it’s exact?
The scientists will be more in the background, giving information and starting points, rather than actually getting involved in the art work which is based on interpretation and imagination.
What is important, I think, is to have scientists criticising the work in the end, to give their opinion about the direction the interpretation is taking. A beautiful example of an artist and a scientist collaborating this way is that of the artist Matthew Ritchie and physicist Paul Steinhard. I think it’s important to show people working together and not apart. But if the artists are free to do whatever they want, this should be explained clearly on the label.
To sum it up, could you name the 3 the most interesting or meaningful concepts or phenomena in which design/art and science meet?
1. Synthetic biology is important. The idea that you can make organisms out of composing bricks.
2. Nanotechnology – designers are paramount there.
3. Visualisation design – designers helping scientists to make sense of their data.