LORUSSO
SILVIO
Silvio Lorusso is an Italian writer, artist, and designer based in Lisbon, Portugal. He published Entreprecariat (Onomatopee) in 2019 and What Design Can’t Do (Set Margins’) in 2023.
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Lorusso is an assistant professor at the Lusófona University in Lisbon and a tutor at the Information Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven. He holds a Ph.D. in Design Sciences from the Iuav University of Venice.
Lorusso’s work touches upon visual communication, memes, post-digital publishing, entrepreneurship and precarity, digital platforms, design culture and politics, creative coding, art and design education, and video games. His practice combines a variety of media such as video, websites, artist’s books, installations, and lectures. This activity is further stimulated by writing essays, curating exhibitions, and organizing public programs. Among other venues, his work has been presented at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), MaXXI (Rome), Transmediale (Berlin), The Photographers’ Gallery (London), Kunsthalle Wien, MAAT (Lisbon). His writing has appeared in several magazines and publications, including Volume, Real Life Magazine, Metropolis M, Il Tascabile, Esquire Italia.
Existential Solutionism: A Dive into the Designerly Unconscious
LECTURE + PANEL
In this talk, Silvio Lorusso introduces the concept of the "designerly unconscious", that is, the unexamined assumptions and emotional dispositions that underpin design culture. Rather than a hidden structure above design, this unconscious lies alongside it, shaping how designers think, feel, and act, often through unquestioned notions like optimism and problem-solving. Drawing on thinkers such as Polanyi, Bateson, and Flusser, Lorusso situates these "givens" within broader social formations, proposing that design culture operates within a historically contingent "magic circle." A key focus is the notion of the "problem", typically framed in design as something to be solved or structured. Lorusso challenges this view, asking what a problem is and what it does to us. This inquiry leads to a critique of “existential solutionism”, namely, a mindset in which life itself is seen through the lens of technical fixes. Moving from technological to personal spheres, solutionism becomes a burden rather than a remedy.