I’m glad that we got to spend our final days in Europe traveling to Treviso. I think some of us were skeptical to be away from Milan in our final moments but the things we saw in Treviso made the four hour bus ride totally worth it. First, we went to Tipoteca Italiana which is a type museum. Our class had had some experience with letterpressing so this place was particularly fascinating. We wandered through there spotless museum and saw the origins of print come to life. Letterpresses, type cases, and important documents lined every wall. Our tour guide emphasized that Tipoteca is “a museum that leaves”, meaning that they want everyone to touch it, interact with it, and be able to take home a piece of it. This led to our next exercise. They were kind enough to let us design and print our own poster, but first we had to come to a consensus as a group about what exactly it would look like. This was a pretty long process. We decided to highlight our program name in Italian (Design in Contesto) with the names of all the designers we learned about scattered behind it. Although it took a long time to get everything right on our end, the poster turned out beautiful!
Next stop was Fabrica, a communication research center, which to me was almost like a monastery for designers. As our guide toured us aroudn their top-notch facilities, we got a glimpse of the students who work there and learned about how we could apply to be a part of it. Basically, you can apply to study there for a whole year for free, but you have to be selected from a competitive group and then undergo a two week testing period before you are officially accepted. It sounded like a fantastic opportunity and great challenge. Before heading off to the design department, we got to see some of their work, the majority of which was incredibly gripping communication designs that took the form of posters, videos, or sculptures. We met the director of design who explained to us the importance of having people from many different cultural backgrounds at Fabrica. He then showed us a few campaigns that they worked on that were incredibly clever. Our tour guide then showed us the library that many of us never wanted to leave. We could have spent hours or even days scoping out the design books in their tiny but amazing library.
