White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 4brings together production and usersby engaging in research, innovationand engineering, to endow goods andservices distributed on the market withfunctionality, social value and culturalmeaning.”The specialised designers mentionedabove are involved in reaching thisobjective, even though they requiredifferent skills, which can hardly befound in a single professional figurewho must have the know-how tocombine the requirements of the endconsumer with products already on themarket (interior design) or to interpretand summarise in graphics themessage a company and its productswish to convey (communicationsdesigner), or even how to anticipateconsumer requirements and, thanks toa baggage of interdisciplinaryknowledge, deliver goods or serviceswhich are innovative in their externalaspect but also in terms of functionscreated. They achieve this, if necessary,by resorting to new materials and newbuilding techniques (product designer).This know-how must inevitably beacquired in suitable training paths. Butit is often also the outcome ofinteractions between designersworking at different stages of theproduct system and interactionsbetween designers and other playersinvolved in the production processwho, purposefully or unwittingly, playa part in innovation, which is theninterpreted by the industrial designerand product designer.We wish to dwell on the productdesigner in this chapter, leaving asidethe fashion designer, partly becausethis kind of design highlights moreclearly the relationship with thematerial culture of a local area. In acontext of district-type industrialdevelopment as found in Italy, inwhich the innovative process iswidespread and draws on very deeproots and the identity of places, somevery significant problems of analysisarise. In particular it is difficult todefine the size of the design sector inItaly: in fact we can opt only to includein this category design studios, i.e. allthose individual or collectivebusinesses whose main activity isdesign, (this was the criterion used bythe UK Department for Culture, Sportand Media in its Report of 2007), butthis will not represent the full extent ofthe situation, or we can extend thecategory to include the overalleconomic data for businesses insectors which we might describe asbeing highly creative and which in Italywill coincide with most of the socalled“Made in Italy” or export-drivensectors. The economic figure willcertainly be too high, but as far as theItalian situation is concerned, we willtry to demonstrate that this secondsolution is preferable.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 96