The French call Coronamaison, launched last March 15 was the first to start with a tweet from the cartoonist Pénélope Bagieu: “Let's design our ideal place to be confined”. More than 1,000 illustrators answered the call on Twitter and as many on Instagram using the hashtag #coronamaison. “I don’t really know how much illustrators took part of this idea. Many illustrators did, of course, but also complete amateurs, children (via their teachers), which is great because the Coronamaison is open to everyone”, explains Timothy Hannem organiser with Oscar Barda of the peculiar competition, now joined by Antonin Segault who is gathering all the drawings within a site (coronamaison.fun). They still haven’t decided what to do with all this work at the end of the quarantine. Among the ideas that have emerged, there is that of bringing them together, like the apartments in one big building block. ““If we were stacking the floors (counting approximately 3 m per unit), it would already be a 2.4-km-high building, almost three times the Burj Khalifa”, adds Oscar Barda. What is emerging from the proposals received? Barda sums up: “For me was humanity. People’s dreams and hopes for the weeks to come, their fears for some, their mindset and their outlook on the world for others. Some draw themselves cocooning with their family or pets, others with a treadmill, training, some with gigantic windows overlooking a lush valley, some barricaded inside atop a mound of toilet paper. These houses are very much our avatars, showing some part of ourselves to the world. And as with every avatar, in a game or online, there is some part of truth, some part of what we want people to think of us, and some part of fantasy. Much like humanity, it’s beautiful in its myriad diversities”.

In Italy, the online call Stay Close(d) was launched by the Graphic Design course of the European Institute of Design in Milan. The challenge is addressed to creatives from different generations and places, to reflect “visually” on the moment we live in, playing with the words “stay closed” and “stay close”. The aim, explains the teacher Giuseppe Liuzzo who organised it, “is to reflect on how distance is actually becoming just a different closeness”. As for now, more than 170 creative people have responded, including alumni, students (also from other schools), professionals, signatures of visual communication from the USA, Pakistan, Korea, China, Ukraine, Argentina, Spain, as well as Italy. Their proposals are collected on Behance. “Design is nothing but intelligence made visible, thoughts that take a shape to speak to those eyes that can then see the final result,” comments Liuzzo. “Graphic design, after all, is not used to decorate, nor to solve problems, but it is the tool that can point the finger towards them, towards a different vision or an effective solution.”