Our Mangrovia Days
A collective design collage to discuss the present and future of this editorial project
What has happened in these first few months of Mangrovia? How do the numbers relate to our expectations? What makes us better and what can we improve on? To answer these questions, we met in person on 16 and 17 July: here’s how it went
Breaking apart and reconstructing in a new and unexpected way together: the Mangrovia editorial project was born to promote the emergence of proposals and solutions to the main problems of our time (first and foremost climate change) through storytelling and the dissemination of other stories that intertwine knowledge and challenge prejudices. We do not offer certainties or catastrophism but aim to broaden the realm of possibility through passionate and verifiable research for which we take responsibility. It is a method we use in our internal relationships before proposing it to you, who read these lines or listen to Zenit. And we used it during our Mangrovia Days on 16 and 17 July, when we physically gathered for the first time at the Creative Ground of Sineglossa, the cultural organisation from which the project originated.
Collage design thinking
For these two days, Sineglossa planned a design thinking workshop—a problem-solving methodology developed through a process centred on the individual and the resolution of complex problems. It can be applied to various scenarios, from the creation of a startup to the redefinition of business processes, to the development of a product or service.
Starting from ourself: in order to understand how people working at Mangrovia see the entire editorial project, in the first part of the workshop1 dedicated to internal perceptions and expectations, we started from the collages created by Eleonora Rossi, representing the graphic identity of the project. These collages were proposed by Sineglossa as a creative tool in a genuine collage design thinking process
Given a selection of three collages, each workshop participant was tasked with cutting out an element that, in their perception, could represent a value of the project, which was then shared with the rest of the team.
From the cut-out elements, the first discoveries emerged: some see Mangrovia as a musical instrument that generates beauty and harmony only if there is commitment and dedication to practice; some focused on the road, seen as both a path and direction for proposed solutions; others see Mangrovia as a vortex of water that flows fluidly and generates movement but could also become uncontrollable, «and so a team is needed that knows how to swim in fluidity, to follow the vortex without being overwhelmed». The sound metaphor came up again and again, in various guises, both in the form of the “voice of biodiversity”, but also in the doubt “are we more gramophone or flugelhorn?”.
As if, perhaps, the fact that Mangrovia is also a podcast and not just a text read on screen makes the whole project a living being, a tangible organism, a body with its own voice.
Disassembling to reassemble: collage pieces in hand, the whole group was asked to put them together, to create a new collage emerging from the values identified by the individual souls of the project.
A new collage that is aesthetically pleasing and meaningful. Here came the second surprise: gathered around a table, the collage came almost naturally, with minimal exchange of opinions on the fundamentals. We were then asked to self-assess the process: was it easy to identify the core message of the collage? How did you reach a shared solution? Were your voices in agreement?
In this case, it seems so, as almost unanimously, the image we chose as the central body of the collage was that of a technological hot air balloon with the editorial team on board, teetering between take-off and landing in a state of dynamic tension between departure and arrival.
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But how does this image reflect the project’s state? And how can it help us to jointly plan the future strategy? We discussed this in the next phase of the workshop through the exercise of giving a title and subtitle to this new collage we created together.
What the collage says about us
Tension, unbalance, energetic force generating movement, coexistence of elements, vectors, living species: the collage that emerged encapsulates themes consistently reflected upon by each workshop participant. Themes were summarised by the titles we found in groups and shared: Don’t look up. The forces of an unbalanced system, Tension. Multivector forces balancing the diversity of elements, Flyhorn. How does tension sound?
While the workshop helped us see that we are on the same hot air balloon—meaning the entire team sees Mangrovia almost the same way—it also invites us to reflect on which direction the project is swinging. Generative tension does not frighten us: in a complex adaptive system like an ecosystem, balance is always a dynamic condition because it results from the relationships between its parts and between these and the outside world.
We thus realised that we had created a collage that tells of precariousness without fragility, where the obliquity of movement is not unbalance but the identity of our method: the stories we tell are transversal, queer, “crooked” compared to dominant stereotypes, both a product and a driver of lateral thinking.
Oblique is the way we have chosen to explore reality without knowing where we will land.
Who knows where this energetic momentum will take us? Perhaps some aspects of this project will change, some internal forces will realign under the impetus of other vectors, but the goal of showing that only the interweaving of knowledge produces social impacts will remain. If we want to change the power relations in society, we must act on imaginaries. And telling other stories of culture, technology, and society serves this purpose.
- The second part focused on analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the project as seen from the outside (i.e. as a product, in its relationship with the public). ↩︎