Designing for a ‘smart society’. How design can generate a more sustainable production-consumption process.

"The paper reports the results of a research in progress that the authors are carrying out to investigate and experiment new processes of "design, production and consumption" in order to obtain a real social innovation.. The research grows out of the observation that today the role of design, together with its creative processes, are experiencing a deep transformation due to two complementary macro-phenomena:. - the exponential growth of technological innovations and the evolution of information and communication processes;. - the economic crisis and the environmental emergency arisen from the process of overproduction triggered during the 20th century.. According to the Design approach, these macro phenomena result in a redefinition of the process manufacturing to consumption:. - on one side, thanks to the new information technology, the process was reduced both in terms of physical location and in terms phases and actors, reconstituting an handmade approach in which the creator coincides with the manufacturer.. - on the other side, to face current crisis, the process is focusing attention on the logic of low environmental impact, consumption reduction, re-use philosophy and practice of recycling.. From a methodological point of view, the research focuses on the overlap of three operative tools:. - the ‘desktop manufacturing’, which allows high flexibility of the work, a customization of the results, an open trial of the materials and an indifference to the economies of scale;. - the ‘smart technologies’, which transform the interactions from functional to cognitive ones, paving the way to a scenario of contents and performances sharing;. - the ‘do-it-yourself’, which shifts the focus from the simple practice of consumption to the practice of production for their own needs while reducing the economic, environmental and social impacts.. The research goal is to imagine a different ‘design player’ which grows out of the convergence between designer (the classical one), ‘prosumer’ (Toffler, 1980) and ‘maker’ (Anderson, 2012). This new player could be able to represent, today, a potentially virtuous alternative to the current economic production and social structure and, if properly developed, which can open more sustainable social, economic and environmental scenarios (Weinberger, 2012).. The expected result aren’t simply new products but a sort of ‘assembly layouts of products’ that can be realized, managed and implemented by a large community of people using an open-source practice."