14 Do's for a Fuller Domus Academy

This article was originally published in Domus 967 / March 2013

Are design schools finished? The answer is a resounding, "No!" In a melting pot of radicalism and optimism, design schools are at the start of a new beginning. Many "creative" institutions won't survive the onslaught of self-produced knowledge, an obvious consequence of the digital revolution. At any rate, if such creative schools do want to survive, nothing less than giant ambitions will suffice. For these institutions, the only hope lies in their ability to offer a transformative experience, both educational and human: how to spend time shut up in a house where the shelves contain all the books published by Gallimard; how to take ten aeroplane trips of different lengths with individuals who live by the maxim "only connect"; how to take part in a seminar where something is really discovered. Here are some ideas for the direction that a school of design, fashion or architecture must take to survive, prosper, invent new forms and be, in technical terms, an institution that produces public knowledge. Domus Academy already offers its students an effective, specialised experience; it is already a school with a global reputation for excellence, and not only thanks to its extraordinary history. But since we can and must set our sights still higher, here are 14 ideas for fine-tuning the venture.

1. A Wunderkammer of ideas
"Cabinets of curiosities" do not just belong to memory. They still exist in the minds of certain authors, from Lawrence Weschler to Geoff Manaugh. In a world defined by dizzying complexity and a sense of accessibility that can induce crippling depression, a thirst for knowledge should be an asset that creates wonder. And the creation of wonder is a political gesture, in Italy and Europe, both in and beyond the world of design.

2. A red carpet for the self-taught
What's the use of a school attended solely by self-taught students? As Andrea Branzi claimed in a conversation with Angela Rui, it would be the best school in the world. Those who don't know how to learn by themselves don't know how to learn with others, and they can't teach those tasked with guiding the learning process. There's no pleasure in guiding this process if nothing new is learnt at the end of it.

3. The fuller
A fuller is a feature of blades. Schools must assault the near future to have an impact later on, at a time when things will have gone the only way they could go, the time of fatalistic necessity — the time of design.

4. Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster Fuller died 30 years ago, on 1 July 1983. Perhaps more than any other, his mind united the qualities of architect, inventor, humanist and idealist in a varied body of work. This first year of the new Domus Academy should be dedicated to this exemplary and enlightening figure, starting with the fine book Becoming Bucky Fuller (2009), which describes how a young architect — who was also hungry for success in pre-1929 America — became himself via personal tragedies, a year of isolation, and changes of direction. Isn't that how self-education works? As Robert Frost wrote: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by."

5. A Fuller Academy
Increasingly, students find the information and knowledge they need online for free. The reason for enrolling at such an institution is not (solely) to consolidate and expand this baggage of ideas and practices, but to have face-to-face contact and gain an experience that is charged with far more emotion than we would care to admit. For teachers, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments could prove more fertile than certain deadpan texts in vogue in polytechnics.

6. Invent new ways to work
In the here and now — at this latitude, in the aftermath of the digital revolution and bogged down in a kind of structural depression — we need to invent and assign new professions involved with the way we design objects (for example, in providing elegant and functional things for the ever-growing population of active, dynamic senior citizens). This approach must also apply to the way we run our cities and the way we produce and distribute food. No other project is worth undertaking.

7. The Atelier
Italo Rota has often insisted that anyone teaching in this kind of school can and must propose at least one concept, image or object that will foster a recirculation of silent learning. The mute presence of accumulated experience is a matchless resource, a debt-less debt.

8. The Atelier of the mistake
Design and business schools never teach students enough about learning from their mistakes. A school should teach them to avoid errors, but also assign a surplus of "care" to each failing, even the smallest. A school based on this simple, insuperable principle may perhaps offer students the most fruitful technical and existential experience. Examining, reconstructing and repairing the mistakes, with due emotional attention and appropriate respect, is exactly what a good teacher should do.

9. Money Design / Social Design
A school capable of revitalising ways of engaging with the design and fashion markets could improve the quality of the entire system in the long term. The same applies to planning within the non-profit and social intervention sphere.

10. Designed space as a literary genre
If you write well, you think well. Recently, Rem Koolhaas suggested that he was an amateur in architecture, sociology and anthropology. Instead, he considers himself a professional writer. Teaching designers of the future to write will not contribute directly to the quality of their work. It will do this indirectly, but in a world where indirect relationships are much more significant than clear-cut relationships.

11. The multidisciplinary code
Like any "advanced" school, Domus Academy is an organism that cannot ignore the existence of a strong theoretical impulse. Why not build here, in the place where Pierre Restany, Alessandro Mendini and Gianfranco Ferrè outlined their own complex journeys in the 1980s, a locus of research into the codes of a multidisciplinary approach, studying how the different disciplines can truly engage in an effective and down-to- earth dialogue?

12. Extreme Weather Design
Inevitably, in the 21st century extreme weather events will occur with a frequency that was previously unimaginable. There is an urgent need to work with students on landscapes, objects and clothes that are suited to coexistence in drastic conditions.

13. A school must produce images
Throughout history, there has never been a school that has not produced semantic objects, images and icons. The school must become a cultural player in the full sense of the term. The teaching, which focuses on students and their development, must represent an opportunity to generate advanced and accessible cultural products, observing Loewy's old "MAYA" principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

14. Italian Design
Domus Academy is Italian design, which is why students from all around the world enrol. But what is Italian design? It's difficult and risky to hazard a concise answer. For my part, I believe that, among other things, Italian design implies an impressive production district. Perhaps, if the school tightens and improves its connections with that district— with companies, skills and people—our answer can be simpler and more brazen. What is Italian design? Domus Academy. Gianluigi Ricuperati, writer, dean of Domus Academy

A small Utopia
Imagining the present and future of a prestigious school does not involve devising a revolution so much as developing a process of accelerated reflection. The school today has difficulty pursuing the different fields of knowledge, in terms of transcribing, absorbing and transmitting them.

Plenty of young people try or flirt with the idea of teaching themselves. Many of today's successful projects are created by individuals with a wide range of skills, who have an engaging and nuanced understanding of life and humanity. Artists do shops and architecture, while architects are cooks and designers—everyone does everything.

A school needs to tackle a system in crisis that is struggling to come up with the tools of self-analysis. Architects and town planners, like designers of objects and systems, cannot shy away from a radical rethinking. It isn't the "crisis" in generic terms that demands this. Rather, it seems to me that it's the "earth", "time" and the "weather", environmentally, historically and atmospherically speaking. At this point I think we can allow ourselves a "small utopia".

To head a design institution such as ours, we chose a non-designer, because we believe the point isn't so much about disciplinary background. Rather, it's about the ability to create a vision, as well as a certain generational proximity to the students, who are the focus of the Domus Academy and naba experience. The process that led to this choice involved consulting a range of people, from creatives at innovative businesses to gurus of the intangible world and wise-old teachers, to understand what type of person could lead Domus Academy and its spirit into the 21st century. This figure had to be capable of communicating what we want to do, what we are doing and what we have done, but also able to "learn from their mistakes", a capacity that is more indispensable today than ever. Teaching also means learning a lot from the students.

In my opinion, an ideal point of re-departure can be found in the manifesto of ideas that Gianluigi has drafted, after long weeks of discussions with me, Alberto Bonisoli, LIADE's chief academic officer, and Marc Ledermann, CEO of Laureate Design. It commits all of us to share knowledge, engage with society and take part in the construction of a world that requires commitment from us all. Italo Rota, scientific director of LIADE (NABA and Domus Academy)