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Certi
Made in art
fied b y
Ugo L a Pie tra
WHEN DIVERSITY BECOMES DESIGN Territorial design is becoming more and more appealing to the manufacturing world, which is moving away from the old concept of industrial design. To recover values that are removed from standardisation
For some time now, the food industry has felt the need to protect the value of diversity through the recovery of crops that were all but extinct, the conservation of vegetable and animal species, the creation of seed banks, and the promotion of the products that are, historically, typical of our territories. Diversity is increasingly becoming a value! Even the design world seems to be finally appreciating the advantages of variety, by encouraging the development of specific territorial knowhow. Suppressed for too long by an intransigent “industrial design” system - which had banned everything that was small production, handmade, traditional in its formal and decorative symbols - the rediscovery and recovery of our cultural, material and manufacturing resources has been a long and difficult process which has characterised the past few decades. Now, spurred by the positive experiences reported in other fields – such as the food industry – the design world is starting to reconsider what it had brutally abolished, but has fortunately survived: the vestige of an increasingly concealed reality.
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New design projects should therefore no longer be inspired by an idea based on a homogenous model of society; but rather follow a path that first and foremost pays attention to the resources available on the territory. In order to create an artistic design in dialogue with the world
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of production – where the industr y can be an individual (self-production), a workshop, a small or medium-sized enterprise, and even a public or private institution – it is therefore necessary to consider where and how, and on which resources, the company which has commissioned the project is based. The resources for a project are often not easy to identify, especially in territories (such as ours) which are deeply innervated by history, culture, artistic and artisan traditions. Every city or village is proud of its particular way of cooking a dish – a culinary identity which is the expression of their own reality. Likewise, each site can give a project the opportunity to be expressed through a specific design, which we define “territorial.” Every urban planner understands the particularities of an urban or a suburban context, a residential or a rural area rooted in agricultural traditions, a seaside resort or a hot spring… The designer too must be aware of what surrounds him and choose whether to work for diversity or for a globalised system in which he himself does not feel represented! The values that are integral to every city, village, square and street… Territorial design therefore means designing objects which originate from the observation of what has always been the greatest value of humanity and of its relationship with the reality that surrounds it: “diversity.”
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