Non résumé is an interactive documentary about choices and mistakes in life and in one’s career. Non résumé is also a community of people sharing the choices they decided not to make.
Our professional pathways are built on our choices. While we tend to evaluate them positively or negatively on the basis of their consequences, the multiple co-existing scenarios we live in suggest other points of view about mistakes.
Resumes are the strongest symbol of this idea: they force us to put experiences in sequence, implying a linear structure behind careers, offering a quantitative analysis about jobs and education. Or, at least, that’s what we want them to tell about us.
What lies before the beginning of a new job? Do we think that a particular university experience was worth it? How highly did we consider it at the time of our decision? Is the start-up “fail again, fail better” trend always a good thing?
The communication project and expressive choices
Non résumé is an ecosystem of communication tools designed to question contact through a linear curriculum.
We have designed a kind of “anti-Linkedin”, constructed using a narration workshop, an interview format, a digital platform.
We have equipped the system with a visual communication system made up of a trade mark designed by emptying the classic “box” to be ticked, a symbol of the result achieved, that has been transformed into an upside-down R.
The online platform adopts the structure of a cluster of classical résumés, collecting things we haven’t done, as opposed to achieved goals. The result is a reflection on possibilities and choices and what we recognize as right or wrong (or both). Each milestone of this non-story is told through an interview.
Through a framework of questions, the interviews unveil hidden meanings behind what lead our choices in careers and in life, they subvert the linear conception of our professional pathways, which are redesigned on the basis of an emotional approach.
The structure of the résumé is also challenged: events which did not take place build a non-real profile, with a different view from a timeline.
The narrative structure of the project is based on a series of interviews that touch on sensitive topics when in the process of making a choice. Each interviewee is narrated using an expressive choice that de-centres them from the frame to make space for an “empty space”.
The interface declines this absence with a circular navigation system so it can be used in a non-linear manner, browsing through the protagonists and the narrative topics.
Non résumé is a “Pillole di Futuro” (Little bits of Future) project, a research area self-financed by Ida S.r.l. and Marketing Arena, two companies active in the digital communication sector.
We felt the need to create a reflective project about today’s employment market and how candidates are chosen. The first interviews go back to the end of 2014; the interactive documentary was officially presented on 24 June 2016.
During the live-version of “Non-résumé”, visitors are asked to fill in a sort of “non-résumé form” about things they haven’t achieved and to be interviewed and filmed, in order to become part of the web platform with their point of view on mistakes. The forms are put onto a physical and digital wall.
We collected interviews throughout 2015 and 2016, taking part in Make Change, Lear Do Share (Gotheborg, Sweden, 2015), and the Matera Design Weekend (Matera, Italy, 2016).
