Planetary Civics

What is Planetary Civics?

The Planetary Civics Inquiry is a joint initiative between RMIT Australia, the Center for Complexity, RISD, Politics for Tomorrow and Dark Matter Labs, envisioning a future governed by principles of planetary stewardship and governance. Driven by conviction and a clear vision, they aim to expand global thinking and governance through the lens of the planetary as interconnected systems and their entanglements.

The planetary, despite what it may suggest, isn’t simply a question of scale. It is a reckoning of our collective relationship with the planet, the ethics with which we engage with and govern its many entanglements, as well as make sense of our place in it.

It is a rejection of the global: a recognition that the planet functions across species, scales, and imaginations. The PCI typeface has been designed to capture this complex multiplicity of multiplicities, evoking its systemic meta-structures and processes — ecological, economic, social, and technological —  as well as the microscopic, rhizomatic, organoid metabolisms that enable life-giving stasis on Earth.

The typeface captures the dynamism of ecological, economic, social, and technological systemic meta-structures and processes. Its reduction is emblematic of (Buckminster) Fullerian geometry even as its thicker weights bubble into an amoebic mass of chemical entanglement—cosmic, organic, and everything in between.

What does it mean to design an emergent identity?

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Designing a visual identity system for an emergent initiative like Planetary Civics requires patience in not giving answers but establishing a visual language that enables questions. In conversation with Politics of Tomorrow and RMIT Australia, I designed a variable font in constant flux between disorder and order, question and answer.

Why use a font as an identity system?

It’s a piece of software that can be installed on any computer. PCI is an international initiative with many collaborators. To give them the freedom to let the identity adapt and evolve, it is best to give them flexible tools instead of rigid templates. Why a variable font? Being a variable font, it can be made interactive on the website, animated on videos, and used in any state of order or chaos, legibility or illegibility, we consider adequate. These are examples of how it could be used.

The Design Toolset

More than a Design Manual, I passed a Design Toolset to our collaborators. It contained templates, examples, color specifications, and assets, but most importantly the variable font.