(UC)

The situation we find ourselves in is like standing on the roof of a burning house, debating the colour of the curtains. We are living in a time of climate catastrophe and other global threats. This compels us to rethink the role of our actions in depth. When I read the daily news, I feel we no longer have time for initiatives that lack genuine agency. The world needs actions that create concrete change for the common good — understood as including both human and non-human beings. However naïve this may sound, in the face of these challenges, I feel pressure as an artist to make my work bring about real change. I deeply believe art and cultural work can and should be tools of social transformation. This conviction is echoed by many art theorists and artists. One well-known example is Artur Żmijewski’s manifesto Applied Social Arts. In it, he stresses the need to restore art’s effectiveness so it may again serve as a practical tool through bold action. Culture and art can no longer afford the luxury of detachment from reality. Every initiative should strive to bring tangible benefit to a world marked by crisis. In this atmosphere of urgent responsibility, I began to question the meaning and durability of my own actions, and how to enhance their actual impact.

It was out of these reflections that the concept of the Usage Coefficient (UC), originally developed in Polish as Współczynnik Użytkowania (WU), emerged. I see it as a tool for self-assessment, available to anyone planning or evaluating their actions, regardless of their field or the scale of their efforts. The Usage Coefficient is not a traditional evaluation method; rather, it is a flexible, context-sensitive approach. Rather than imposing a single standard or formula, it invites us to ask project-specific questions to clarify the meaning, intention, and practical impact of our actions.

From the perspective of the Usage Coefficient, it is especially important to think of actions as processes. An action that truly matters is not a one-time incident but an ongoing process that can be monitored, adjusted, and continually refined. Such an approach makes us aware of shared responsibility — the fact that the results of any undertaking depend not only on a single author or initiator, but also on all participants and the environment in which they operate. Equally important is attentiveness to scale: reflecting on how broad the reach and impact of our action can realistically be — and should be. Not every project needs to be global in scope or replicable everywhere. Local, niche initiatives tailored to a specific community or problem are equally valuable.

What matters most, however, is that every undertaking should be able to justify its meaning, its duration, and the trace it leaves behind. We should understand why it matters, what problem it addresses or what need it responds to, how long it should be sustained, and what lasting impact — positive or negative — it may have on its surroundings. Such self-reflection helps us avoid activism for its own sake and protects us from investing energy in actions that are spectacular yet ineffective.

While writing my dissertation and analysing artistic and post-artistic practices in terms of their agency, I kept returning to one persistent thought: the absence of a tool for objectively assessing, according to fixed guidelines, whether a given action has the potential to be effective in practice. Although this absence remained invisible to me for a long time, it eventually became increasingly burdensome in the artistic projects in which I was personally involved. The concept of UC presented in the following pages grew out of this reflection and is my response to that identified gap. I believe that the careful self-diagnosis proposed by the Usage Coefficient is now indispensable if our initiatives are to have real meaning and effectiveness. In a time of climate crisis and other urgent problems, we should demand more of ourselves than lofty ideas alone — we need solutions that lead to real change. The Usage Coefficient is an invitation to this kind of conscious design of action: to ask difficult questions about the consequences and value of our undertakings before we set them in motion, and at every stage of their realisation. Its purpose is to ensure that every project — regardless of scale — leaves behind a meaningful trace rather than a merely ephemeral impression.

UC is addressed to all those who turn to art in search of agency, regardless of experience. For this reason, I have tried to make the language of this text as accessible as possible, and the concept itself easy to apply in any situation.