I have just returned from the OFFF fes­ti­val in Barcelona. Ear­lier this year, they asked me for a state­ment about the future. They announced this the Year Zero, a restart. Go back to zero, wipe out the past, etc. Not sure I agree with that, but that’ll be the topic for another comment.

Usu­ally, I deny these requests because I don’t like mak­ing pre­dic­tions about sub­jects I don’t know. But they insisted, and in the end I sent them this lit­tle piece:


Rethink Design, Redesign Think­ing.
As a designer, I like the future.

After cen­turies of being dom­i­nated by tech­nol­ogy – from cut­ting wood to print­ing neg­a­tives, from bak­ing mud bricks to rein­forc­ing con­crete – design­ers of all dis­ci­plines now have the tools to present and make any­thing imag­in­able. There is no excuse for not com­ing up with new con­cepts. Design­ers and archi­tects can no longer blame their short­com­ings on the lim­its of tech­nol­ogy. There will always be clients to blame –  that has not changed since the Pope asked Michelan­gelo to paint the ceil­ing of that lit­tle chapel in the Vatican.

The best thing, how­ever, is the fact that we are begin­ning to real­ize some­thing else: we have tal­ents that go beyond mak­ing things work well and look good. We can also take apart ideas, look at them, throw away what is not needed and put them back together again. Design­ers can redesign think­ing. And we need to, because nobody else will.