summ( )n

I wrote earlier, albeit very briefly, that I am working on the presentation for the Russian Union of Designers. Well, yesterday came the day when I had to present what I prepared

The whole idea of this lecture was quite a surprise for me, it emerged after another presentation I gave at the CreArt forum in Brussels in February. There was a member of the Russian Design Association at this event too, Yelena Yurchenko, who later wrote a very good piece about the event.

At some point I learned that I will have to go to opening of my exhibition in Moscow, and will most likely stop in St. Petersburg as well. Then came an invitation for ‘a small meeting with the peers’; then the meeting with the peers was extended to a meeting with peers AND some students (“about 30-40 people“, they said).

Well, at the end it was public lecture (!) announced on all major web-forums (see the picture above which was used as ad banner for the event; it says, in Russian, ‘Design for the Possible Future’). The union even printed the cards for the event, using the pictures from the different projects I sent them, shaped as a letter F (F is for the Future):

The most dramatic part was the venue: the lecture had to happen in the Museum of Communication, a very old historical building one block away from the colossal Isaac Cathedral. I didn’t take the pictures of the hall where the lecture took place, but on their own brochure it looks like that:

It was, I guess, the most pompous hall I’ve ever presented in And – it was freezingly cold there, people had been asked not to take their jackets and coats off during the lecture. Which itself went pretty well, almost four (4!) hours in total, with a lot of questions and discussions after.

Content-wise it was a sheer panorama of the cases of ‘future designs’, or the various projects and programs aimed at exploring possible futures with design, by design, and for design, over 150 slides in total. It started from Poeme electronique of the 1950s and ended with the latest cases from the Next Simplicity and Design Probes; I deliberately limited the scope with the cases only from Philips/Philips design, partly because I know them most, but also because they provide a clear enough framework of analysis of this design genre.