The Usage Coefficient (UC) is a planning and diagnostic tool for socially engaged artistic and post-artistic practices. It is intended for artists, collectives, institutions, and grassroots initiatives. UC structures work on projects from PROPOSAL, through USE, to MAINTENANCE. Its purpose is to support decisions about continuing, revising, phasing out, or transferring solutions that have already been developed.
The key theoretical and practical ideas behind the creation of this tool are the following:
Tania Bruguera’s useful art (Arte Útil) — with its emphasis on practical implementation and social usefulness,
Stephen Wright’s usership — with its shift from the viewer to the user,
Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture — with its understanding of society as a living organism that can and should be shaped consciously and creatively,
Jerzy Ludwiński’s concept of the post-artistic era — with its blurring of the boundaries between art and life,
and elements of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics — with its focus on designing situations and micro-communities.
To respond comprehensively to the reality in which we find ourselves, UC also draws on posthumanist horizons. It takes more-than-human participants into account and upholds the principle of “do no harm.” UC understands durability as action carried out “within limits” and operates on a scale that is “just enough,” drawing on post-growth tools. At the same time, UC retains its operational core within the field of art and remains a practical decision-making tool rather than a theory in itself.
The purpose of UC is to provide diagnostic tools at both the planning and evaluation stages, helping to design more durable actions that can be sustained by local communities after the project ends.