White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 44.2 The roots of ItaliandesignA large number of varied players areinvolved in the success of Italiandesign. Most people agree that productdesign in particular includesprofessionals who come into theofficial category of designers on thegrounds of their training and work inspecialised studios. But product designalso involves a whole series ofoperators who do not simplyimplement design concepts but activelytake part in shaping prototypes. We canthus argue that there are twooperational segments in the sector:outright design and effective design(Maffei and Simonelli, 2002).These two market segments includeplayers with various degrees ofawareness of their role and localised indifferent ways in the country. The firstcategory, the designers – the“professionals” – are mainly localisedin a few very large urban areas. Thesecond category, craftsmen andtechnicians, are the tangible expressionof the wealth of the Italian district-typeareas and therefore work inneighbouring small to medium-sizedcities, typical of the Italian districts.The complementarity of these twocategories constitutes the idiosyncraticaspect of Italian design. Design did notactually come into being in Italy but inthe northern European countries,which had been industrialised earlier. Itspread to Italy in the early decades ofthe 20th century paradoxically thanksto the fact that our industrialisationprocess was not very far advanced.What might have seemed a limit in thematrix of Italian design, “an objectwithout an industry” (Brusatin, 2007)became one of its strengths, becausedesign developed and was implementedthanks to the fundamental contributionof highly skilled craftsmen deeplyrooted in the local territory, eventhough lacking high standards ofeducation. Their intenseindustriousness led them to make notonly prototypes but very often also toexperiment with innovative solutions interms of material and morphology. Allof this was done either in agreementwith the project creator orindependently for purely emulative andcompetitive purposes.Last, we might argue schematically thatthere are two categories of players (ortwo places) in which design productionis organised: design of communicationsand services (in metropolitan culturaldistricts) and product design (mainlyconducted in some industrial districtareas) with specific problems for whichdifferent solutions must be found.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 97