A coffee with Hernán Ordoñez

With over 25 years experience as a designer, project leader and professor, Hernán Ordoñez has been creating and leading multidisciplinary design teams and developing educational design programmes his entire career, so much so that he had the idea and was one of the founders of Bilbao's Istituto Europeo di Design headquarter, the institution known around the world for their groundbreaking method of mentoring students under the eye of a master designer.

Deeply fascinated by tackling ideological projects and giving them the appropriate development, Ordoñez has born in Argentina, but he has found his home in the small village of Hondarribia, along the coast of Northern Spain. A designer, for Hernán, has a broad vision and the ability to find world class opportunities, generate projects and collaborate on  them successfully. He considers design a cultural discipline inseparable from the context in which it is applied - with the review, study and impression of design craft all impacting greatly the daily culture and experiences we have. He likes to be inspired and challenged, he's a fan of free association and, of course, of LEGO. 

Tell us a bit more about your story…
The academic part of my professional life started when I was very young. I was close to 20 years old and among the first professors who graduated as a Designer at the University of Buenos Aires. Years later, I began to travel to Europe, Spain for that matter. Here I pitched workshops and design & typography classes to different Schools and Universities. I remember I had traveled all over Spain, and a couple of Directors, including the IED's Barcelona, liked my ideas; years later, I started working there! Back then, I kept traveling from Argentina to Spain, started teaching in a small school in the Basque country, and I fell in love with Hondarribia. Since then we started winning some awards in Spain, but also internationally, which was the real focus. A few years later, I was called by IED Barcelona and started a new fruitful experience not only as a teacher facing the future of Visual Design, but also bringing new opportunities between the academic world and the industry. When you begin to open minds, especially the youngests, when you do something different as a designer, you’ll truly have a social impact and feel part of a more complete scenario. I’m thinking of the union between IED and the small Basque school: it improved the lives of their teachers, staff, students and, of course, the society pushing forward together. Across my life I have learnt design really helps people improve their lives, easy to tell but not so easy to implement.
At the same time I have been able to lead projects for very diverse companies and institutions such as Guarro Casas (paper makers with 325 years in Catalonia), Real Sociedad de Futbol (one of the most important clubs in the Spanish Football League), UADE, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Selected Festival, CPB-Lab, CERN, NTT-Data and NEOM, among others.
Nothing is possible without a reliable team: I never work alone. Specific design boundaries are currently blurred and design is an attitude, designer´s activity never ends, so I never close doors of new ways, new challenges, like The Carrot Collective among others.

I know your work continues beyond the academic field…
Yes, of course. I also work as a designer and project leader with different clients, aiming to push innovation as much as possible. You will build a social impact whenever you do something different as a designer, I think.
For example, to me, typography (my major interest and specialization) isn't just about letters or building letters; it's more about designing the reading and the writing; in other words it's about the communication flow. I’d love to explore this theme a bit more in another post soon!

Why did you decide to be part of The Carrot Collective? And what does it mean for you to be part of TCC?
One of the main reasons is my nature to push innovation, to do something that never existed or be involved in making something that doesn't  exist. And the other is the multicultural aspect, working with people from all over the world and the friendly environment. As in life, in my career, I want to grow and improve and to work with kind people. What I really like in Carrot Collective is that when I talk about an idea I have, it returns to me enhanced. This resonates perfectly with my thinking: I don't want to necessarily execute my idea, I only want to be a trigger. 

Can we say this is how you view creativity?
Creativity is the tool to overcome the barriers you have, and today we are lucky enough to have a lot of actors in the creativity theatre. For example, technology, platforms, media and most importantly: people. Creativity and imagination are our most potent tools. It's a matter of imagination; creativity and imagination go hand in hand. If you understand that creativity is not repeating formulae and think you can improve something, you really can change things. To me the first steps of this change are within the education system, which is why I combine my two professions, professor and professional.

This is truly inspiring and deserve an in-depth discussion! Thinking about the future, what if I ask you about your vision for the future of work? Could you find 3 words to describe it?
Firstly, “unpredictable” but with a good connotation. If the future was predictable we wouldn't have jobs as designers, and we would probably be bored. Take the Covid pandemic: it was close to unexpected, yet it gave us an incredible amount of energy and shook everyone's mindset. Then I think “pluriverse”, which  implies accepting differences and understanding that reality is formed not by only one universe under the hegemony of certain conceptions like rationality, individuals, science, the market or the economy. I look towards a true pluriverse of socio-natural worlds, as the beginning of new worlds (or universes). The last one is "connection": we are not living in a little town or city like our grandparents used to. Today, it isn't about distance anymore as we can reach almost anyone, but it is about having time to do that and thankfully today we have the technology, the tools and the network to do so.

What do we need to invest in as a society to reach this future?
We should work on the here and now to reach the future. First of all, we must be open-minded and work in a genuinely collaborative way because the frontiers of design are blurred now.  Investing in adaptability and ways of collaboration is the only way possible.