“What makes us as individuals satisfied in professional groups or communities of interest, that is, when are we satisfied in the membership of mankind or membership of the entire living community on the planet? What is one pleased to do and how is one pleased to take part? What are the priorities of personal and what of collective pleasure and do we have them within our reach, or do we have to create them?”

The path to happiness

In his 2016 text, Utopia and Messianism: Bloch, Benjamin and the Sense of the Virtual, Daniel Bensaid, speaking about the philosophy of hope of Ernst Bloch, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, points out that “Bloch’s utopic quest opens onto the need (…) for a thought finally capable of giving a philosophical dimension to the hope situated in a world.” Bloch then, saying in the first volume of his famous work The Principle of Hope, “Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge. And the new philosophy, as it was initiated by Marx, is the same thing as the philosophy of the New… Only thinking directed towards changing the world and informing the desire to change it does not confront the future as embarrassment and the past as spell”, concludes his thought with a quote from Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev, also included by Lenin in the equally famous 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?:

“If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.”

I did not reach for these great philosophical quotes in my short article about design on the occasion of the upcoming, long-awaited new Zgraf, to appear smarter than others, but to emphasize the importance of politicizing the issue of achieving individual and collective satisfaction and happiness. For me, the foundations of this issue lie in the assumption of hope, in the understanding that everyone involved in joint work and life hopes that the outcome of their mutual relations will be for the common good, and with this belief as an ethical principle, approaches discussions about the content of their work and professional or personal life, as well as decision-making. For my own part, I am not much interested in talking about satisfaction as an outcome of a process but rather about happiness. I perceive satisfaction as the word itself tells us: when personal and social prerequisites for work to occur have been met, work should be performed to the benefit, and not detriment, of all who participate in its performance; when, in addition, their individual and collective work is valued equally, we could say that mutual, or multiple, satisfaction has been achieved; however, I also think that this is the base, whereas our goal should be to achieve happiness. Universal happiness for all. Happiness should build on the work, be a value that is more than the sum of its parts. A phenomenon that transcends the original reason that got us together to work together, but at the same time unites with it in the overall reality. A sign, if not of equality, then at least of fluidity between dreams and life, as the above thought suggests, that should mean the fulfilment of the original hope and the achievement of a state of happiness. And satisfaction, of course.

As primarily an art critic who deals both with design in contemporary visual culture and art to which design may be closer today than it has ever been since its very beginnings, I am happy to see an example of graphic design or visual communications which I assume has gone beyond the project brief by deepening and expanding the original purpose that should have been meet. I am convinced this can only be achieved through an equal relationship between the client, the designer and the contractor, in which all three involved are willing to raise their awareness of the personal and social prerequisites for establishing and achieving cooperation, but also of the consequences of jointly made decisions, both for themselves and for society. At one point, I came up with an idea of sustainable visual communication which, naturally, I did not consider original, but which became a welcome worldview reference to me when it comes to design that I follow and study, and as of recently also shyly practice again, in other words, love as a profession and a calling. Because of that, I feel that as individuals and as a society we should support images and messages designed to last longer than the modern average so they can continue to tell a story that matters even after the campaign has ended, the application and technology have become obsolete, the visual identity brand has ceased to exists, the event from the poster has taken place… Design should raise awareness of the time we, as just one of the communities on the planet, no longer have much or any at all, yet despite that, design too can participate in achieving happiness, but by no means only for those who live from or for design. Let the long-awaited Zgraf be part of that journey.

Bojan Dmitrović Krištofić

Bojan Dmitrović Krištofić (Zagreb, 1987) is a designer and writer. He received his MA in Visual Communication Design from the Design Department at the Faculty of Architecture in 2012; and in 2022 he started his PhD in History of Art, Cultural Heritage and Visual Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, with the topic of artistic events in the public space of Novi Zagreb during the Second World War. He was a long-time member of the editorial board of Zarez, a biweekly for cultural and social issues, and has published art critiques and reviews in several cultural media in Croatia and the region. Today he regularly writes for the weekly Novosti, and occasionally for the Kulturpunkt portal and the Triptih show on HR3. He is also involved in research and curatorial work. He was a scholar of the public foundation Akademie Schloss Solitude in the international literature group in 2018. He received the Postscriptum Award for Literature on Social Media in 2017, and the awarded manuscript was published as the first book of poetry Makroorganizmi (Jesenski&Turk, 2018/’19; Petikat, 2022/’23). The book Krajolik i kralježnica followed in 2022/’23 (HDP Poetry Library). Today he is employed by the Serbian National Council as one of the editors in culture on the VIDA TV channel. He has also published two samizdats: U međuvremenu; u (with Sven Sorić and Hrvoje Spudić, 2017 and 2021) and The Bicycle Chronicles (translated by Vinko Zgaga, 2018). From 2013 to 2015, he regularly collaborated with the Croatian Designers’ Association, first as an assistant to the head of HDD galleries Marko Golub, and then as a member of the organizational team of Dan D, an international design festival. From 2015 to 2017, he was employed at Superstudio Design Projects d.o.o., where he co-organized the Design District Zagreb festival, for which the team received the HDD 2016 Grand Prize. He also distinguished himself as a book cover designer (Gypsy, but the Most Beautiful by Kristian Novak, Satanic Tango by László Krasznahorkai, Greetings to the Fanatics by Amos Oz, and others). He was also the co-editor of the Radio Borba show of the Zagreb Anti-Fascist Network on Radio Student. From 2019 to 2023, he was a permanent associate and member of the Art Organization Ateliers Žitnjak as the head of the AŽ Gallery. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Independent Artists (in recess), the Croatian Designers’ Association, the Croatian Writers’ Association, the Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics (HS AICA), and the Zagreb Anti-Fascist Network.