So my diary isn’t going too well… there’s a temporal disjunction between the amount of sensory and cultural input I’m receiving and my ability to write it down. This maybe due to my poor writing skills, my lack of routine and discipline or it could be that I’m being over-stimulated and my fingers are too slow.

I do however, need to record my encounter with Gaetano Pesce. I went to a lecture he gave at Columbia on Monday and it was an incredible experience. It was perfectly timed for me; I was desparate for a type of input that would uplift me and make me have hope in design and design education.

I’ve been a long time fan of Pesce. I first came across his work during a period in my design education when I tried to deconstruct my aesthetic values. I looked for work that I didn’t ‘like the look of’, that challenged the norms of my aesthetic sensibilities and I found Pesce and Sottsass. Both of which, I had instant aesthetic responses against, both I have grown to love. I’ve been lucky enough to hear them speak, had they’ve had a massive impact on my understanding of the world and the world of design.

Pesce’s lecture at Columbia Architecture was full of humor and insight. He spoke passionately about what he felt was worth while in architecture. He made the distinion between ‘architecture’ and ‘building’… he said that most of the constructed environment today – the buildings that the architecture press sell as Architecture (with a big A) are merely buildings. Because true architecture both reflects the context in which it sits, but also moves it forward – it speaks of a future. He beleives many of today’s star-hitect buildings are BORING!

He has a joyful playfulness combined with grand scale hopefullness that I feel is missing from much of todays design culture. He really gives NO FUCKS. I went along, aware that I could be disappointed with an old, white, italian man who was likely to be sexist and old fashioned. I came away wanting him to adopted me. He talked about gender politics, a tricky thing for an old man to do in the age of #metoo, but he sent a clear message: the male ego has fucked things up, we need to give all positions of responsibility to women.

In an age of post-disciplinary, post-industurial design practice that engages with the knotty problems of the 21st Century, it’s hard for us to remain connected to a material practice, a sense of simplicity, or humour in the face of desparation. There’s very little to smile about in the world. As we look through our tiny media windows we see things that feel too big to ‘solve’, too advanced to restore. But Pesce remained hopeful, he remained humble and he remained deeply individual in his aesthetic evolution.

One of the things I worry most about is how, as designers, we manage to evolve a sense of humour (what, in conversations with Fiona Raby & Tony Dunne call), a ‘lightness of touch’, in response to the complexities of our world. At the moment I see a bifurcation; where funny, joyful and light work sit in the realm of meaningless, excessive consumption. Whilst social engaged, community focused and politically meaningful design work is often humourless, austere and self satisfied. We need to stop being so binary. We need to be multiple.

In the questions after, I was a little too overwhelmed and intimidated to ask a question, but after the lecture, talking to a colleague we thought of loads. The two most important are; how does Pesce make decisions about his ideas? And, does he think it’s possible to teach the sense of self confidence needed to produce work that bucks the trend – that reaches outside of the aesthetic norm?

A student asked about his working process; he answered by saying it’s simple – he has an idea, then makes it. Although I laughed, I’m not convinced this is true, he must have a way to work though an idea, to understand if it’s worth pursuing. He must have a way to make decisions within his process. I’d like to try and understand this process a little more.

As for the pedagogy of confidence, I’m a bit stuck. My hope is; if you are an educator and you support the learning of students to understand (self actualise), to be revolutionary in their understand of the world, to transgress the social, political and aesthetic norms, to help support them in understanding their agency… then this confidence will come. But I’m not too sure… I hope it does.