Prompt: One and a half months before the opening of the XXII Triennale, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, The Museum of Modern Art hosted the second Broken Nature symposium, to explore the notion of restorative design. Drawing on architecture, urban planning, geopolitics, linguistics, and other overlapping fields of research, the symposium traced design’s potential to repair humans’ collapsing bonds with nature, and offered a dynamic exchange of opinions through individual presentations, panel conversations, a debate, and video contributions.

Broken Nature

The XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, highlighted the concept of restorative design and studies the state of the threads that connect humans to their natural environments––some frayed, others altogether severed. In exploring architecture and design objects and concepts at all scales and in all materials, Broken Nature celebrated design’s ability to offer powerful insight into the key issues of our age, moving beyond pious deference and inconclusive anxiety. By turning its attention to human existence and persistence, the XXII Triennale promoted the importance of creative practices in surveying our species’ bonds with the complex systems in the world, and designing reparations when necessary, through objects, concepts, and new systems. Even to those who believe that the human species is inevitably going to become extinct at some point in the (near? far?) future, design presents the means to plan a more elegant ending. It can ensure that the next dominant species will remember us with a modicum of respect: as dignified and caring, if not intelligent, beings.

Image: Panel discussion; Photo: Sam Ozer