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In her book The Circuit (available here), graphic design writer, researcher and educator Hannah Ellis investigates the actual meaning of design when it reaches the scale of fairs, festivals and biennials, as well as the effects of these events on people and places. Here, we publish, with permission of the author, a short excerpt about the political and economic genealogy of these manifestations. The Circuit is the the first title in the ‘Design Capital’ series, edited by Francisco Laranjo, Luiza Prado and Silvio Lorusso.

Common sense suggests that ‘design events’ are obviously and exclusively about design. But a more complex conclusion of what they do or are or how they exist in the world is slightly harder to pin down. They are slippery things, tricky to articulate precisely because of the fundamentals we take for granted, and subject to unofficial precursors — like ‘promotional’ — that change their meaning entirely.

‘Events’ is too big a category to file under, a cluttering of festivals and weeks and biennials, piling together the exhibitions that take over a city for days, weeks, sometimes months. Flags are planted overnight and lay claim to a place that has been conquered by design. From the outside, beyond the length of time that they stretch out and over a city for, they behave largely in the same way, or at least appear to. Differentiation requires a bit of etymological digging: take, for example, the meaning of ‘festival’ – a day or period of celebration, usually religious. For the most part, design festivals are annual, celebrating the subject with Gregorian predictability, much like the dedicated Weeks that block out one fifty-second of the industry calendar. Language puts ‘design’ next to deities and, traced back far enough, ‘festival’ can be followed through iterations of Old French and Latin – festivalis, festivus – to the root of festa, for feast. A day of dedication or a celebratory meal; in this case, what is gorged upon is not good food and wine, but an overabundance of design with the capital D. (They should not, I realise later on, be confused as moments for close examination or interrogation; further backwards still, festa is one step removed from festus – joyous.)

In this issue of Other Worlds, Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente, founders of the F/LOSS-oriented design studio Manufactura Independente, rigorously dissect Stayaway, the contact tracing app launched in Portugal during the Covid pandemic. By analysing both the technical limitations of the app and its misleading visual metaphors, they prove that a grounded criticism of public health monitoring systems is possible. Reconsidering the app after its demise, they warn us against a novelty bias in the public discourse, which is too focused on promotion and expectations rather than consequences and effects.

The persistence of the pandemic has motivated many proposals for digital solutions to fight Covid. Contact tracing apps are one of such endeavours: by measuring how close smartphones are and how long they stay so, their purpose is to warn people of potentially dangerous contacts with infected people. As part of our work in Portugal’s digital rights association D3, we’ve dedicated a good amount of time to the analysis of the evolution and failure of Portugal’s contact tracing app, Stayaway Covid. As a result, we published a lengthy public report highlighting the shortcomings of this experiment. In this brief text, we offer a design perspective into the app’s interface and communication strategy, in order to outline the less evident pitfalls in rapidly deploying untested technologies as public health measures.

Failure

In this issue of Other Worlds, Pernilla Manjula Philip reflects on the various practices of care revolving around her illness. A complex scenario emerges: the safety procedures regulated by the official healthcare system limit the well-being allowed by do-it-yourself technologies developed by independent communities of makers. The approach of these makers is, in turn, often too technical and masculine to include most users. With her artistic work, Pernilla mobilizes empathy to counterbalance this state of affairs.

Care

I did not care that much about the medical-industrial complex before I found myself in a hospital trying to wrap my head around the fact that I will never leave again. I would eventually go home, but I would bring my diagnosis with me. And with that, bring the hospital along. My brand-new illness has attached me to a world of care that I will always depend on. A lifetime of needing care.

In this contribution, Silvio Lorusso examines various ways in which designers have conceptualized, expressed and exerted their power. Furthermore, he looks at how such power overlaps with notions of authority, hierarchy, prestige, responsibility and ethics. The goal is to provide a specific set of categories to map the power relationships in which the field of design operates beyond both subjectivism and determinism. On the 27th of September, Lorusso presented this work at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology of Lisbon and discussed it with design critic Francisco Laranjo, director of the Center for Other Worlds.

An interview between Silvio Lorusso and @wdka.teachermemes

French designer Anaëlle Beignon recently graduated from the Interaction Design department of Malmö University. In this excerpt from her master thesis, Beignon shows how obsolescence is not just an internal quality of a device, but a dimension that emerges from the relation between such device and the broader sociotechnical ecosystem.

“My computer is too old, I’ll have to change it soon.”

In his new book CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape From It