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Future, well-being, interdependence: key-words for contemporaneous design
African experiences, founded the Emerging Future Lab, highlighting that maybe
the most proper word to transmit the apogee of the social design issue is “the
urgency” of giving concrete answers to the problems that the future continents
will have. A similar work has been carried out since 2012 by Carlos Teixeira (2013),
throughout his research project about the processes of construction of the needs
of the territories and of the communities that belong to the great hungry regions
of the world (China, India, Brazil etc.); the research group which I belonged to,
between 2004 and 2008, in the Polytechnic of Turin, prepared, based on the theme
“The man in the center of the project”, it’s a paper for the International Conference
Changing the Change organized by Ezio Manzini in the ICSID event’s during the
Turin: first world design capital 2008.
In this moment that we focus our scientific attention precisely on the integration
between the human sciences and design, it is spontaneous to retake this binomial
of social design to make clear that there is not another design besides social design.
Every modification of the artificial brings consequences in a very short and in a
very long term over the real; and the real of the artificial is, obviously, the natural.
The artificial is defined by the difference of the natural, but inside of it, the artificial
is a lifeless part. And the man is the hinge between these two systems, being inside
of the biosphere and being the only responsible for the technosphere. It does not
exist, therefore, modification or artificial project that do not have consequences in
the biosphere; and the biosphere of the man is, at the same time, characterized by
the biological and social consequences, one inseparable from the other. We may,
then, affirm that each consequence of the artificial has a social consequence and
that we are not carrying out a design action, but to obtain social consequences
foreseeing in our actuation 2 .
It is social to be concerned about the hedonist dimension of a global reduced
“wealthy class”, like T. Veblen (2007) called it more than a century ago; it is social
to occupy ourselves with the “design for billion” like Teixeira (2013) and Bhan
(2008) do; it is social to occupy ourselves of the specific demands of a tiny local
community, incrusted in an unknown village; it is social to face the problems of
2 ”Design has a social function and its true purpose is to improve people’s lives.”- Nokia Design Manifesto (BHAN;
TAIT, 2008).
Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 105-130
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