When does design actually begin and when does it end?

Albert Camus wrote about a world that has no built-in order or purpose, and a world that simply doesn't care about us. And yet, humans keep searching for meaning anyway, almost like they can't help it, trying to make sense of everything around them.

A ready-to-use, consumable object offers a certain comfort. It suggests clarity, resolution, a sense that everything has already been decided. But maybe that feeling of 'completeness' is just an illusion we created — as if we're mistaken into thinking meaning was fixed from the very beginning.

I am more interested in what remains unresolved. In design that does not fully conclude, that waits to be experienced, interpreted, altered by use. Design that allows understanding to emerge slowly, through proximity rather than ready-to-use.

Projects such as Autoprogettazione, initiated by Enzo Mari, reflect this way of thinking, show that design doesn't have to be something you just receive and consume — it can be a process you're part of. Where you come to understand the structure, the proportions, and the materials not by being told, but by actually engaging with them yourself.

I do not see design as something to be completed alone. Its meaning, like order itself, feels provisional. Something formed only in the act of use, and re-formed each time it enters a life.

https://collections.cid-grand-hornu.be/en/node/2413

1.3    Dezeen, “Enzo Mari grants Berlin refugee organisation rights to reproduce his furniture”, 2015
1.4    Domus, “From Enzo Mari to the right to repair: can we still design autonomously?”, 2021

My grandfather was an architect. Because his work often took him to Switzerland, he naturally fell in love with the Alps and eventually hiked to the summits of both the Alpine range and the Himalayas.

In Time Sensitive, Spencer Bailey writes about The Parallels Between Mountain Climbing and Architecture, by an interview with Tom Kunding, whose practice is deeply shaped by mountain climbing. Kundig describes climbing as an encounter with uncertainty, where preparation matters, but success ultimately depends on how one responds in the moment. For him, the summit is secondary to the way one ascends—the elegance, efficiency, and skill of the process.

Architects are often imagined as precise and controlled. However, my grandfather was the one who totally flipped the concept. He was a free spirit who valued process over outcome, finding meaning in collaboration, patience, and real-time decisions—much like a film director Hong Sang Soo who work without a script.

At first glance, hiking may seem distant from architecture. Yet nature is unpredictable, and building within it is less about control than dialogue.

That is why I feel my grandfather’s architecture resembled hiking: finding a path through uncertainty with patient. And I believe our design practice, too, must learn to arrive at outcomes not by resisting nature, but by engaging with it.
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Copenhagen-based furniture brand Frama transformed an old apothecary into a space split between a furniture showroom and a café, intervening only minimally in the existing structure. Similarly, Lille Bakery repurposed a former shipyard drawing office into a bakery, preserving its duplex layout so visitors can observe the entire bread-making process from above. In both cases, the value lies not in novelty, but in continuity, allowing the past to remain visible while adapting it for present use.

We're surrounded by objects and systems that already work well. In that world, the idea of a completely new future is getting harder to imagine. We live in a globalized environment where ideas travel fast and technology keeps promising more — and we're constantly told that the future has to be faster, newer, better. But it's worth stopping to ask: do we really need that kind of radical reinvention? And does progress always have to mean replacing what already exists?

In this context, the exhibition The Shape of Things to Come, curated and designed by Milan design studio Formafantasma, staged inside Negozio Olivetti designed by Carlo Scarpa, offers a compelling contrast. Within a space that embodies durability, craftsmanship, and social responsibility, the exhibition critiques electronic waste, the technology industry, and planned obsolescence. 

What are the things we truly need to carry into the future? And what have we chosen to keep, and repeatedly discard, along the way?




3.1     Jonathan Ellery
www.jonathanellery.com/works.html
3.2    Jonathan Ellery
www.jonathanellery.com/works.html
3.3    Formafantasta, The Shape of Things to Come at Olivetii,
formafantasma.com/work/the-shape-of-things-to-come
3.4    Frama, CPH
thehudsonco.com/news/2016/3/10/inspired-by-frama-cph
3.5    Lile Bakery, CPH
www.cntraveler.com/gallery/best-bakeries-in-copenhagen
3.6     Frieze, “Why, at 95, Magdalena Suarez-Frimkess Matters for a New Generation of Women Ceramicts”, 2024
3.7     Kaufmann Repetto

Masanao Hirayama works with ordinary tools—ballpoint pens, markers—drawing simple, repetitive lines on paper. His childlike imagery, infused with quiet humor and emotion, feels intentionally unpolished. In its restraint, the work gestures toward something essential, free from excess explanation.

I often return to this idea of essence. Searching the concept of Nothing(無) in wikipedia reveals countless philosophical interpretations, but one thought from Jean-Paul Sartre continues to linger. In Being and Nothingness, he describes humans as beings that are not yet: defined by freedom, always projecting forward, always planning. That sense of nothingness feels deeply connected to our constant hunger for stimulation, our need to keep moving, filling ourselves, and becoming something more.

We rarely stop to ask whether the things we chase are truly necessary, or whether they're just more noise piled on top of noise. In a culture that equates progress with speed, novelty, and abundance, complexity is almost never questioned. It gets added by default. But I believe clarity doesn't come from accumulating more — it comes from taking things away.

At times, rather than introducing more systems, more images, more signals, there is value in removing, carefully and deliberately, what no longer serves us. In that act of reduction, we create space to return to something more instinctive and direct: a quieter attention to our most basic impulses, and to the essence that remains once the noise falls away.

When Michelin was founded by André and Édouard Michelin in 1889, there were fewer than 3,000 cars in all of France. Their insight was straightforward: people would replace tires more often if they drove longer distances. To encourage driving itself, Michelin created a free guidebook for motorists, what would later become the Michelin Guide.

Originally, the guide focused on practical travel information such as tire maintenance, fuel stations, repair shops, and places to stay or eat. It was not conceived as a culinary authority, but as a tool to shape behavior. Only later, after realizing that people value what they pay for, Michelin transitioned the guide into a paid, independent information product—one that ultimately reshaped global food culture.

This shift reveals a larger principle: strong brands do not remain confined to products. They expand by guiding experiences.

Much like how Disney transformed a cartoon mouse into something people could see, wear, visit, and feel, brands grow by extending their core idea into lived experiences. Design, in this sense, cannot remain limited to logos, typography, or color systems. It must operate across multiple dimensions—shaping how people move, interact, and participate in the world a brand creates.




5.1     First Michelin Guide, 1946

As we move through life with urgency, it feels almost inevitable that we orient ourselves toward the future. Progress, growth, ambition become second nature. Yet the further we move into adulthood, the easier it becomes to forget our instincts, the quieter impulses that once guided how we felt, imagined, and played.

Is there a way to gently recall the memories of childhood that still reside within us, not as sentimentality, but as something more fundamental? Fashion brand SUPER YAYA and Bode presented their new season on a doll instead of a model. Where does this styling instinct come from? Didn’t many of us first learn how to dress, how to imagine, by clothing dolls as children?

Nostalgic is not simply about history, rather deeper emotional memory: how it felt to trust intuition, to respond before reasoning, to find meaning in our childhood memory. Bibibi, designed by Ingo Maurer, was originally created as a wedding gift for his friend, which introduces mystery through instinctive, almost childlike imagination.

Could revisiting these fragments awaken a different kind of nostalgia—one that speaks not to who we were, but to what still remains within us? A nostalgia not rooted in the past itself, but in the instincts we gradually learned to suppress as we became adults.

Yubi-kiri is an act of linking and twisting pinky fingers to seal a promise. A gesture so small, almost playful, yet widely understood.

No contract is signed, no words are required. It shows how naturally we accept the meaning assigned to it. The body performs a simple action, and agreement is assumed. Through this gesture, an abstract idea—trust, obligation, commitment—becomes physical.

It is a reminder of how deeply we live within social conventions without actively questioning them. How many of our behaviors feel instinctive, when they are in fact learned? How often do we participate in shared rituals, accepting their meanings as if they were inherent rather than constructed?

Yubi-kiri reveals how easily symbolism settles into everyday life. A quiet agreement between bodies, sustained not by logic or proof, but by collective belief. In noticing gestures like this, we are invited to pause—to recognize how much of what we call “natural” is shaped by invisible frameworks we rarely examine.