Milan Design Week 2013: Review Part 1. Or, Why So Much Paper?

The above is all the paper we brought back from Milan Design Week 2013.

Three visiting cards. An Interni programme. A ten journey carnet. A couple of receipts. A page ripped out from our in-flight magazine.

We are so proud of ourselves.

Normally we return from Milan with enough paper to create a lifesize papier maché copy of Rodin’s The Thinker.

This year we were determined not to.

And had one large motivation and one important theoretical guide to help us.

The motivation was the two flits we have undertaken in recent months: new office and new flat. On both occasions we spent most of our time throwing away mounds of postcards, flyers and press releases that have accumulated over the years.

A thankless task and one we swore we would never, ever, repeat.

The theoretical guide that helped us was the ever brilliant “One Hundred. An Experiment on Myself: A Designer’s Reckoning With Things” by Moritz Grund, a book we can highly recommend.

The result was that 2013 was the year we learned to say “No, thank you!”

And in Milan one must say “No thank you!” quite a lot.

For every few metres temptation lies in your path.

And we ask ourselves, why?

In our modern, digital age is there not a better solution? In a world awash with smartphones, tablet computers and clouds, is there not a better solution?

Or put another way “You’re meant to be designers! Sort it out!!!”

Just like a football World Cup or an Olympic Games can never be environmentally friendly, so too can an event like Milan Design Week never be justified ecologically.

Alone the act of transporting the tons of largely unsellable furniture to Lombardy is to laugh in the face of all those species man has driven to extinction.

And while most of the hot gas emanating from the “ain’t it all fantastic” lifestyle blogs is virtual, the electricity needed to power their wet dreams and store their instagram images is very real.

But can we not at least reduce our dependence on paper?

The more forward thinking producers and designers have done away with paper and offer information either on USB sticks or even better as downloads.

But far too many still expect you to leave them with an armful of documents and /or an expensively printed paper bag.

And not just the big players and their corporate sponsors. One of the reasons we don’t have the names from all the Magic Moments Inside at Galleria Viafarini participants is that the information was only available in a collection of postcards. We didn’t realise this. Just assumed that students would have made the information available digitally. And so didn’t take any in-depth notes.

Assumption is of course the mother of all journalistic failure…..

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you throw documents away in your hotel room that evening or five years later when moving out of your office.

It is still waste.

Needless waste.

And it would be nice to think that an international design community that is always very quick to tell us how wonderfully environmentally unobtrusive their projects are, could also start using less environmentally obtrusive ways to tell us.