Building bridges – Editor-in-Chief’s welcome
After such a long silence, it is difficult to know how to start anew. A year and a half ago, everything began to change, and Designisso – despite the best of intentions – was, for a while, forgotten. Yet the magazine has a fair share of experience with such changes: when opening its archive, everything moves faster, expands, and condenses, revealing countless faces and configurations of its community, the desire in people to connect, and their capacity for renewal. It is like an island where several intersecting bridges meet, connecting different moments in time, ideas, stories, and people. As Designisso returns amid the cultural shifts, it is worth considering what a community space like this might mean today.
The bridges it builds expose Designisso to continuous multidirectional change: it shapes its community while being shaped by it; it influences the wider discourse around contemporary art and design culture, while being influenced in turn. Its character is continually formed by the many contributors who pass through its student editorial team, changing from semester to semester, just as the magazine itself leaves its mark on them through an educational programme built around workshop-based learning. It connects them with Hungary’s cultural institutions and helps them learn how to find their way within this landscape; how to identify the most compelling subjects and issues; how to think critically about them, formulate questions, and develop informed analyses. It also gives them space to experiment, to make mistakes at times, to give feedback on one another’s work, and to experience success in sharing their own views, criticism, and research publicly. Every Hungarian and international expert featured in Designisso, along with every question or issue raised within its community and beyond, contributes both to the magazine’s evolution and to the knowledge it develops and shares – whether the focus is on raw material-centred design, the use of mycelium, the transcendence of human-centered design, inclusive fashion, the challenges of contemporary product design, or the relationship between design and intimacy. Amidst all this change, its commitment to editorial independence is constant: it is keeping a finger on the pulse of the cultural field while shaping and articulating, a persistent curiosity, in-depth and accessible critical thinking, and experimental approaches.
That is why, when considering Designisso’s role today, we cannot ignore the recent changes. Something has begun to shift, and the entire cultural scene is stirring around us. Across many different forums, people are now talking about the past sixteen years. About institutions that have been appropriated and transformed beyond recognition, leaving them unable to offer meaningful support in imagining viable professional career paths. About cultural publications that have disappeared or been pushed to the brink of collapse, and which, despite their best intentions, struggle to sustain professional discourse. About the painful shortcomings of public education, which prevent us from raising a generation that is receptive to, curious about, and able to appreciate contemporary art and design. But we have regrouped, and almost everyone now seems to be moving in sync, each exercising their own agency and testing the limits of what they can do. The new forums and initiatives now taking shape across the cultural landscape are a welcomed development, even if it remains uncertain how we can meaningfully discuss and collectively come to terms with so many accumulated grievances; so many problems swept under the rug; such deep divides between generations and their experiences; such entrenched gatekeeping aimed at protecting the status quo. How we can reckon with the past sixteen – or perhaps even more – years, and envision and build something new in their place.
Something has begun to shift, and while some of these problems extend far beyond the scope of a magazine like Designisso, they have a very real bearing on its role in supporting professional careers, building community, producing and sharing knowledge.
Returning from its hiatus, the magazine gives us an opportunity to rethink what a diverse forum serving both the university and the wider professional community might look like. It allows us to create an independent forum for professional discussion, where we can ask questions, voice constructive opinions and criticism from time to time, reflect on creative and research practices, and consider the many different approaches to contemporary art and design and their political, social, and economic contexts. It also gives us a chance to ask how Designisso can engage with its community and find its place in today’s media landscape in ordert to unlock its potential of bringing people together and ensuring the knowledge it produces can gain a meaningful foothold despite the constant clamour for attention. As a hub for critical thinking and intellectual exchange, Designisso allows us to keep learning from and about one another, the world, and ourselves – and in doing so, to play an active part in bringing about change.
Designisso now returns as an educational platform, a forum for the university community, and a voice in the wider cultural sphere, with this period of change lending new significance to its work. Embracing these changes, the magazine will work to strengthen its community, evolve with it, expand it, and seek opportunities to collaborate with students, different academic programmes, professionals, and initiatives both within and beyond the institution. Designisso will continue to build bridges, guided by the values established through years of dedicated work by its previous editors-in-chief while remaining responsive to change. The aim is to create a diverse and vibrant environment for shared learning, nurture the dialogue across the university, and contribute to public discourse through knowledge-sharing and open discussion.
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