Design x Ksenya Samarskaya
Strategist & Designer
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Zach Vieth on December 10, 2020.
To give our readers a sense about you, what are your favorite or pivotal roles and mediums you’ve worked in throughout your career?
Right now I’m pivoting a lot to editorial, to storytelling. Maybe that’s just something that happens as you get older. You realize there’s something about the fluid accordion way that narratives travel, the ways they can later bloom and blossom. And I think right now, we’re living through a dearth of narrative. We’re in crisis. And we’re needing seeds to replenish all the destruction; the looming bleakness that we’re living through. We need other paths out.
I’ve also really enjoyed diving into understanding how to lead a team, how to facilitate a classroom. From a really wide angle, this includes the mediums that we communicate via. This includes the spaces and architecture we’re surrounded by. There’s something about aligning goals, and not having so much within a team working against each other. There are so many different weights and pulls working on us at every moment, that just lifting a few of those can do a lot to push momentum forward.
What is a common thread throughout your design and all the mediums you work in?
My general thread is, perhaps, that I make for a really good amateur. I rally beginner’s luck. I love research, and framing new questions or new problems. I have a breadth of varied experience, of lived circumstances, that I’m able to pull from. All those things, when layered, tend to become quite useful in approaching novel scenarios.
What possible applications of tech excite you the most? What are you optimistic about? What are you weary of?
I guess I should dive into the weariness head-first? I went through a huge crisis of technology, crisis of design, perhaps two years back. On a global scale, and—I’m not of the Pinker school of thought that we’re living in some glory days of no violence just because our violence looks different—we got to a lot of the problems we’re facing now because of technology. We got here because of design. Our pursuit of technology gave us the unending workdays, the new leaps in class inequality, the raping of minerals out of the planet. Design escalated the role of the white savior, of homogeneity, of that homogeneity translating to the scale at which resources are usurped. Both combined brought us concrete construction, fast fashion, the global supply chain.
Having stated that, this is where we are. There’s no parallel reality to jump over and compare this with. We can do things to mitigate, we can do things to lessen, we can do the things to transition. But our current systems are built and interconnected in such a way that it's almost impossible to crack oneself from them: we’re one organism. I think one of the first things needed is to call things out as they are. Maybe that's one of the biggest things because you can’t attack a problem until you can excavate it and talk about it.
There’s also the good, right?
All of the improvements with remote connection and knowledge-sharing have gotten us to where we are as well. Where we were able to have this year, 2020. And have it be as relatively tolerable as it was. As hard as it is to not see friends, partners, or family for months on end as many of us are navigating new health and financial nadirs. We can still video with them, we can still remain connected. We are able to continue conferences, schools, and jobs via a staggering of remote technologies. So I’m deeply excited about connection and knowledge sharing. I’m excited about knowledge getting cheaper to share. I think that’s democratically fundamental. I think it breaks the monopoly of schooling open in potentially opportune ways.
I’m cautiously optimistic about green technologies. I’ll have to continue researching to parse out the ones that are truly meaningful from the ones that are just shifting problems elsewhere. But I know we’ll need those innovations and solutions, even if flawed, in order to weave forward to a sustainable, viable future. I wouldn’t say greener, because I don’t think the choice is between green and… blue, or purple. I think the choice is between existing and not existing. And I will say I’m excited about the reintroduction of ancient and traditional technologies: rammed earth construction, mass rocket heaters, aqueducts, rain gardens. I’m excited about new knowledge-weaving, and new production methods, combined with old technologies. I’m very motivated by the remixing that can be done when we use all of this together, and compress time in a certain way.
What design problems do you think are worth tackling in the next one to five years?
For the earth not to fall off its axis into the hell bellows of climate catastrophe? Seriously. We’re not talking a hundred years out on this. It’s much, much closer around the corner. And it’s ominous. And dark.
To tackle it, it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. We need different narratives, different advertising for how to live. We need political might to turn off the most harmful industries. We need green technologies and low-fi anti-technologies. We need love and effort poured into the parts of the environment that are still functional systems.
For every moment we lapse, for every moment we think government initiatives are enough, that mitigating or lessening our ways of existing is enough, we compound the problem that we’re going to face down the line.
“For every moment we lapse, for every moment we think government initiatives are enough, that mitigating or lessening our ways of existing is enough, we compound the problem that we’re going to face down the line.”
How can designers better amplify the voice of underrepresented communities as we think about these problems?
This is a hard one to talk about. I think there are a couple of conflicting pieces of advice. It’s like concentric circles that wobble. On the outside, if you care and you’re asking this question, awesome. That’s making it through the first doorway. Once you’re in there, it’s important to not see yourself as a savior. It’s important to accept other knowledge, other solutions, that aren’t your own or from your heritage.
What role has academia played in your career and what does the future of academia look like?
Academia was maybe one of my last golden calves to have shattered. Perhaps art is behind that. I still have a belief in the redemptive power of art.
I am the daughter, and grand-daughter, and grand-niece, of very proud researchers, very proud academics (education was free in the USSR). I come from a country that values knowledge, mathematics, history, language, depression, thought, thoroughness. So many apartments I remember filled to the brim with books. Certain teachers I’ve had have completely saved me over the course of my life. They noticed things that no one else did. They gave me windows of opportunity, conversations, experiences, ways to see myself differently. I’ve had wonderful educators that were completely central in making who I am as a person in middle school, in high school, in college. It actually it wasn’t until graduate school that I had my first horrible educational experience.
But the system of academia. I would say it was broken had I not gone and read and studied upon its foundations. Because unfortunately, in many ways, it’s working exactly as designed. Though it’s simultaneously bloated and crumbling, and is experiencing a complete shattering. The for-profit higher education system in the US is a pretty high scam-percentage. It was on the edge, the pandemic is pushing it over. We’ll see how long the pandemic lasts or how the academia system realigns and reforms itself in its wake. But, it’s also opening up an immense opportunity. Because while academia buckles, fails to meet the changing world’s needs and demands, and doesn’t prepare us properly, the thirst and need for knowledge is innate and unflappable.
I don’t know the future of learning, because there are always at least two. There’s always at least a utopia and a dystopia. But remote teaching is opening up huge possibilities, especially if people get beyond the immediate reaction of trying to translate a physical classroom experience into the digital realm. The increasing irrelevance of a degree in many fields is opening up opportunities for alternative schools, and unique paths, towards accomplishment. The business model where people are used to paying exorbitant sums means there’s money there for various start-ups to try something else. The rapidly shifting world we’re living in requires different types of training, and more frequent interval training, that lasts throughout life rather than the initial one-and-done pony show. There’s space for diversification again. The abundance of free knowledge on the internet and elsewhere means our perception of learning pivots. Teaching in an age of information scarcity and teaching in an era of information overabundance are completely different skills. Navigating life amid information scarcity and information overabundance are completely different skills.
Again, there’s my utopian model of what I think humans need, the world needs. What could make us healthier and more collaborative and more curious and more empathetic and more individually successful? And then there’s the Idiocracy Black Mirror model where education gets usurped by Big Tech and gets less theoretical and purely practical. It fragments even further down the Ford Model conveyor belt. And people are more disposable and less interchangeable between firms.
So, you know, we have options. And what’ll most likely come out is some complex interweaving of both.
