All forms of creative expression have always played a fundamental role in facilitating alternative visions, promoting narrative changes on a social and political level and describing possible future scenarios. As critical forms of expression, they are able to question conventional ways of knowing and experiencing the world, and as such, especially in this historical moment of clear
and present crisis, they have ceased to provide absolute answers, but have begun instead to ask new questions. Design, for instance, rather than manifesting itself as a practice of images, capable of producing only “desirable” objects, is increasingly turning into an investigation tool, which finally questions its own infrastructure that facilitates its own process.
The tension between the transformative power of design and its participation in consumption is not a new issue, but what seems new today is the approach to a more holistic and inclusive perspective, aware of the complex network of relationships that connects the productive ecosystem with the natural one.
The role that design must have from now on should be to translate this emerging awareness (environmental, social, political...) into informed and collaborative responses, where the very definition of design is changing, gets contaminated with new knowledge and expands its perspectives, thus becoming an instrument capable of producing a real transformation.
The talk will see in conversation 5 different realities that, in their practice, have begun to question certain modus operandi and have conceived alternative solutions that on the one hand denounce the obsolescence of many mechanisms considered “common practice” and on the other provide real changes with practical interventions, expliciting the nature of design as an Agent of Change.