Office landscape tra avanguardia e tradizione / Office landscape between avant-garde and tradition

The contribution proposes an interpretation of invention design as a collaborative process and exposes a reflection on the ap-propriate conditions for triggering processes to discover unusu-al solutions. With this aim, the Workshop organized by Philips Electronics and Olivetti in 1993 was selected as a case study. The Workshop had the purpose of reformulating, in a new way, products and behaviour of office work. The results of the Workshop – that are still today at the forefront of the products distributed on the market – can be contextualized and interpret-ed as inventions also thanks to a text that Michele De Lucchi wrote, in 1992, as a planning document for the strategies of Olivetti’s design sector. Moreover, the comparison between the prototypes originating from the Workshop and De Lucchi’s text allows to address some considerations about the role of elec-tronic design, as a tool capable of combining complex aspects of design, of production and social processes, as well as a tool for designing environments predisposed to experimentation. The paper also highlights how the idea of a laboratory can in-fluence a conception of office work, which, moving away from the stereotype of productivity, encourages human relations and collaboration; it highlights the properties of the workshop as a design tool, in which the meeting between people and mutual stimuli are the premise for developing new interpretations of office work, understood as a profitable place of exchange and interaction. In this sense, one of the characteristics of design, that is the ability to create systems and at the same time systems of relationships, becomes central.

Il contributo propone un’interpretazione del design d’invenzione quale processo collaborativo e espone una riflessione sulle condizioni appropriate perché si inneschino processi alla scoperta di soluzioni non consuete. Con questo obiettivo è stato selezionato, come caso studio, il Workshop organizzato dalla Philips Electronics e dalla Olivetti nel 1993, che aveva lo scopo di riformulare, in maniera inedita, prodotti e comportamenti del lavoro d’ufficio. Gli esiti del Workshop – a tutt’oggi, all’avanguardia rispetto ai prodotti distribuiti sul mercato – sono contestualizzabili e interpretabili come invenzioni anche grazie a un testo che Michele De Lucchi ha redatto, nel 1992, come documento programmatico per le strategie del settore design della Olivetti. Inoltre, il confronto, tra i prototipi originati dal Workshop e il testo di De Lucchi, permette di affrontare alcune considerazioni sul ruolo del design dell’elettronica, quale strumento capace di coniugare aspetti complessi dei processi progettuali, produttivi e sociali, come di progettare ambienti predisposti alla sperimentazione.