The geometric shape with the most faces? That’d be the high-dimensional polytope—a fancy term for shapes in dimensions beyond three. But if we’re talking about 3D shapes, the ones with the most faces are usually things like geodesic spheres or polyhedra that come from repeated subdivisions.

I read polytope and geodesic for the first time in my life and think: wow, okay… polytope? Whatever. But geodesic? Now that’s a gorgeous word. Would you say you’re a polyhedral person, Ingrid? You know what? If I had to pick, I think I’m more of a geodesic, now that I think about it.

But seriously, I’ve never been able to say, this is who I am or this is who I’m not. Every day I’d probably give you a different answer, and honestly, I think that makes things harder. People need to slap a label on you, file you neatly away in their mental drawers, so they can say at Christmas dinner: this is black, this is white, she’s like this, and the other one’s like that. But honestly? Sorry, most of us don’t work like that. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to feel a little less shapeless.

Last Wednesday, I got up on stage at Sala Taro in Sants, Barcelona, with Enric Farrés Duran and Miguel Ángel Blanca for an open rehearsal of our new music project: Les Eminències. It’s this no-frills punk thing in Catalan where I scream-sing while shredding the guitar. After the gig, I was kind of in shock—and I wasn’t the only one. Most people there didn’t know this side of me, and honestly, I hadn’t done the one thing that gave my teenage self a reason to exist for, like, eighteen years. When I was sixteen, I left home and started a punk band with four girls from Osona to scream at the patriarchy and take over the county. But three years later, we broke up: two of the bandmates started med school, and the punk attitude didn’t seem compatible with burying yourself in textbooks.

The thing is, little by little, I also started to feel like my shape didn’t fit into the Swiss design box. I walked into the door of the first studio I worked at wearing ripped red tights and Converse, and I walked out in skinny jeans and Chelsea boots. Back then, I thought that to be a good design professional, you had to present a good image and that, on top of that, to attract clients with decent budgets, my work also needed to feel harmonious, elegant, and refined. And so it was. Within a few years, people started describing my work as cute, and I found myself indignant at such a flat, two-dimensional, and unauthentic description. Mea culpa. I brought it on myself.

That said, it’s not like what I’ve done has been fake. Adopting certain shapes at certain times has definitely helped me get places. But now, I feel like simplifying ourselves for life is just a mistake. We’re the sum of so many shapes, and with that in mind, what is coherence if not the harmony of chaos that exists outside the boxes?

Best regards from the H6 bus,
Ingrid