A talk for a graphic designer is always an opportunity to analyze oneself, or to analyze others. In this case, the public psychoanalysis session was offered to us Wences Sanz, the event promotor, to talk about design and everything that occupies and worries about the profession. We decided to focus the talk on the debates that arise day after day in the studio, which are not few. Among these daily debates there is a recurring theme that has to do with the design that we consume daily and that we all pay for: design and public administrations. «Deep down, nothing different from any other project, but when it comes to public money everything changes. What is normal in almost any field, in the public sector becomes bureaucratic, legal, everyone’s money, transcendent and with incredible impact,” said Víctor Palau and Ana Gea in their editorial from Gràffica magazine about this topic of Public Design.
Public design procurement, a difficult problem to solve.
And it is in this transcendence that we get embroiled every day. What if a badly commissioned campaign, what if random criteria in public contracting, what if there is a lack of understanding of the real capacity of design to solve everyday problems. A tantrum here, a tantrum there. And that’s what we took to Club Fedrigoni to reflect on three problems that we detect on a daily basis and that we needed to share with the guild in a talk we entitled “The total absence and complete excess of graphic communication and its lack of planning in the public sphere”. There you have it.