Mediation is design
Aug 26
5 min read
How spaces, objects and architecture acquire meaning — and why cultural mediation belongs to the design process.
A space does not speak for itself. We read it through materials, proportions, light and use. The same is true of objects: their meaning does not reside in form alone. It emerges in the relationship between the object, the people who encounter it and the cultural context in which it is placed.
Yet mediation is often understood as something that comes afterwards: a text beside an image, an explanation attached to a building, a story told about an object. I see it differently. Mediation begins where design meets perception. What a project sets in motion, how it is understood and the relationships it makes possible are as much a part of its effect as material, form or function.
This conviction goes back to my earliest encounters with design. At Knecht Arredamenti, the interior design business where I grew up, furniture was never simply displayed and sold. It was placed in context — through conversation, encounters with designers and architects, and questions about why an object mattered and what ideas had shaped it. I learned early on that design takes concrete form in an object, but does not end there. It continues in the way an object is understood, used, lived with and eventually becomes part of everyday life.
One formative example was the early introduction of the Memphis furniture collection to Ticino. In the early 1980s, Locarno-based interior architect Jakob Knecht was already presenting the group’s work in Switzerland, at a time when its radical visual language was still largely unfamiliar. Founded in 1981 by Ettore Sottsass, Memphis brought together designers from different disciplines and countries, including Michele De Lucchi, Matteo Thun, Nathalie du Pasquier and Martine Bedin. Their colourful, playful and deliberately unconventional designs challenged established ideas about function, taste and domestic life.
Bringing Memphis into a local context therefore meant more than introducing a new range of furniture. It meant opening up a different idea of what design could be. Mediation created a space in which an unfamiliar visual language could be encountered, discussed and, eventually, understood.
Some things are kept precisely because they become more than objects. Year after year, once the inventory was complete, a Memphis plate somehow found its way into my collection. Alongside my Spaghetti Chair it evokes a time when design was not simply consumed, but debated. Today, these objects are part of my own history. They also offer a small, personal example of how design can acquire meaning well beyond its original function.
Space as experience
Long before a space is explained, it has already made an impression. We enter it, move through it, respond to its materials, light and proportions. Meaning begins with this physical encounter.
I became particularly aware of this at Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station. Completed in 1993, it is not a building that reveals itself at a glance. Exposed concrete, sharply defined geometries and the tension between movement and stillness create a spatial drama that unfolds as you move through it. The building engages the body. Circulation becomes directional, edges become visual cues and thresholds become moments of orientation. Architecture is not simply something to look at; it is something to experience.
Photography can communicate some of these qualities, but it cannot reproduce the experience itself. This is one of the central challenges of mediation: distinguishing the image of a space from the space itself, and drawing attention to qualities that reveal themselves only through movement, time and perception.
I encountered another kind of spatial experience in Achille Castiglioni’s former studio in Milan. On the piano nobile of an elegant Lombard palazzo, a full-height mirror stands diagonally across one corner at a 45-degree angle. It is a deceptively simple intervention, yet it changes the perception of the entire space. A single corner becomes the intersection of two long corridors, their far ends disappearing behind overflowing bookshelves, drawing tables and display cases. The space appears larger and deeper while at the same time resembling an open laboratory for thought.
The studio still feels as though Castiglioni has stepped out only moments ago. Sketches, drawings, models and everyday objects remain in place. The space preserves not simply a collection of things, but a way of working and thinking. And it is precisely that seemingly incidental mirror that offers a key to Castiglioni’s approach: a small intervention can be enough to make a familiar situation appear in a new light.
From design to context
oday, we often encounter architecture and design first as images: a rendering, a carefully composed photograph, a short sequence on social media. Before entering a building or touching an object, we have already received an interpretation of it. That first impression shapes the expectations we bring to the experience itself.
Mediation therefore does not begin with the explanation of a finished project. It begins earlier — with the choice of what to show, the language used to describe it, the connections we establish and the questions we choose to leave open.
These experiences continue to shape my work. At Swiss Hypertext, editorial work begins precisely in this space between content and context: approaching architecture as a process, design as a cultural practice and the object as the outcome of decisions, relationships and ideas. My role is to give these connections structure and make them legible without reducing their complexity.
Architecture is not only what has been built. It is also the decisions, conditions and ideas that led to it. The same is true of a piece of furniture, an exhibition or a publication. What we see is only the visible part of a process.
Mediation makes that process accessible. It connects perception and context, experience and knowledge, project and public life.
Mediation as part of the design process
Perhaps this is where its creative dimension lies.
A project acquires meaning not through physical form alone, but through its encounter with the people who look at it, use it, interpret it and carry it forward. Mediation creates the conditions for that encounter.
Mediation is design.
Not an addition to a finished project, but part of the process through which design becomes legible, perceptible and relevant.
Key insight
Good design does not end with the finished object or building. Mediation is what makes design legible. It is therefore not an add-on, but part of the design itself.
Martina Knecht
Text © Martina Knecht
Images (top to bottom) © José Pino, © The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, © Vitra Design Museum, © Fondazione Achille Castiglioni
Read on
Memphis Milano
Ettore Sottsass and the history of the Memphis group
Vitra Design Museum
Zaha Hadid and the Vitra Fire Station
Fondazione Achille Castiglioni
The studio, archive and work of Achille Castiglioni
Swiss Hypertext
Editorial work across language, culture and design.
→ Explore Swiss Hypertext
