In 2021, Mane Tatulyan founded M2-Systems™, a project focused on modern-matter systems. As both a philosopher (MA and PhD) and designer (BA), Tatulyan comprehended design as a way of ordering the world, and philosophy, as a way of understanding it. Design is, in a way, a humanist discipline, a radical singular practice that has been created by humans for humans. Furthermore, design can be understood, in a wider sense, as applied philosophy, as the concrete materialization of ideas in the world—a conception that was tested in its highest form under the principles of Modernism. In this context, M2-Systems™ was born at the intersection between philosophy and the applied arts as a continuation of the radical and universal ideas of global modernism.

Modernity was, as Weber affirmed, a process of rationalization, a process of understanding the universal and rational structures that underlie the world. The element of ‘rationality’ makes Modernity a universal process, a structural development in thought that trascends space and time. This new vision shaped a new way of structuring, understanding, and signifying the world (and the human's place in that world). In the aesthetic realm, modernists developed a radical yet timeless body of work. The modernists of the 1950s were driven by the will to reconstruct and reorganize the world through design, through conceptually powerful systems that emphasized the social and humane responsibility of design. The discovery of the DNA of Modernity defines it as an epoch that shapes a very singular dialectics between the particular and the universal. The creator, as the intersection between the material particular and the metaphysical universal, had the duty of materializing the spirit of the time by bringing new yet understandable and universal forms into the lifeworld. Continuing the rationalist heritage of their historical grandfathers, the socialist modernists unfolded a singular and colossal system of objects, codifying the spirit of the early Modernist period. In essence, a return to the early Modernist period, but with a refresh framework, an updated project. The aim was one: to decode the universal and rational structures that underlie the world.

As modernists, we believe in a practice that creates a constructive dialectic between the subjective and the objective, the individual world and the social world. We as well embrace the standardization and rationalization of visual systems. We believe in discipline, order and structure as the conditions of possibility of creativity. We enjoy the movement of what is alive, specially when it is captured, enframed by the form of reason. As Chomsky says in terms of modern linguistics: ‘The existence of that genetic rigid constraint provides the basis for our freedom and creativity’ — and creativity is ‘freedom within limits’. Design can be understood, in fact, as a way of organizing reality — and organizing reality is reason. We believe in timeless forms and monuments of time, for which we emphasize the use of Helvetica for corporate communications and visual systems, because of its clarity and distinction. We act based on the moral imperative of design’s social responsibility and civic duty, standing against obsolete, fashionable and irresponsible design brought forth by the postmodern movement. In the same way that our modernist predecessors built the solid grounds for our edifice of creativity, we must leave a world behind that is worth for those who come after us. We, finally, revive the subversive, radical potential of Modernism, as a way of communicating our viewpoints, ideas and values, and as a form of reincarnating ourselves the spirit of Modernity. That is the true committed, militant creative.

However, all the energies of postmodernism are concentrated towards liquifying the Modern project —under a generlised amnesia that negates our roots to it. This is why today we must look back but with the eyes of our time, with the spirit of our time. Because when one says Freedom, Humanism, Progress, Critical Thinking, Autonomy and Reason, one says Modernity. We are successors of Modernity — and this is why remembering the Modernity of yesterday, we can build the Modernity of tomorrow. Something singular about the universality of Modernity is that, by the construction of a framework of meaning, creates a community, an ecosystem. To remember this legacy is to be able build a meaningful system of tools for the future lifeworld and overcome, as Vignelli said, ‘that disease that is called Postmodernity’.

The multilayered physiognomy of Modernity has a rational yet revolutionary legacy —which is its radical, dialectical, and subversive side. Thus, Modernism was always more than a style or an époque, it was a way of thinking and, ultimately, a way of being in the world, an attitude towards the world. In this context, M2-Systems™ continues this modern legacy and brings back the conception of design as a method of organizing the world to expand and democratize the humanist and universal DNA of Modernity — because modern matters. Modern matters — in a double understanding: (A) in the material sense, modern matters are the manufactured artifacts of M2-Systems™, this is, printed tools for the mind; (B) in the idealist sense, modern matters because the moving engines of M2-Systems™ are the timeless values of the philosophical discourse of Modernity.