11 May 2016
Two years after Dopo gli anni Zero. Il nuovo design italiano, Chiara Alessi returns with a volume provocatively entitled Design senza designer (“Design without Designers”: both books published by Laterza). It paints a lively picture of the current design scene in Italy, set clearly against the background of an economic and cultural process that is continually evolving. In spite of the book’s title, its author points to a growth in the number of designers, or rather of the creators of designs, for in reality the figure of the successful designer, with a name known to the public at large, has given way to a large amount of anonymous ones. At the same time, there has been an acknowledgment of the importance of other figures in the chain of production and communication, such as artisans, contractors, operators, technicians, dealers, entrepreneurs, curators, PR officers and journalists: the book collects the testimonies of 40 of them, presented as examples of excellence. It also talks about fab labs and small-scale producers, about new modes of distribution straddling the divide between online and offline and about different ways of relocating production in cities. All these stories—some told through video interviews stitched together in a documentary—help to define the new connotations of design, which is not in danger of extinction, but simply changing, setting aside the figure of the hero who does everything by himself and replacing it with a more complex system: the designer, writers Alessi, is “a super-curator, an orchestrator […], or again, to borrow the analogy used by the architect Peter Eisenman used in reference to Koolhaas’s Biennale, the designer is the grammar that holds the language together. But, just as knowing the words is not enough to master a language, the grammar is not the words. And, without words, grammar is meaningless.”
Giampiero and Carlo Piccinelli, artisans, Creacemento.
Maurizio Riva, entrepreneur, Riva 1920.
Alessio Sarri, ceramist, Ceramiche Sarri.
Lucio Spinelli, entrepreneur, Plastamp.
Luca Tilche, second generation Arform.
Dario Di Vico, journalist, Corriere della Sera.
Federica Sala, curator and design consultant, PS.
Massimo Bianchini, researcher, Polifactory.
Cinzia Baldelli, head of purchasing for the home and design sector, La Rinascente.
Vincenzo Cannata, Simone Panfilo and Laura Angius, entrepreneurs, Lovethesign.
Massimo Secondin, entrepreneur, Secostampi.
Giambattista Scalfi, research and development office, Fontana Arte.