Il design che prima non c'era e quello che sarà

The essay goes beyond the three well-known dimensions of time; in fact, here we consider the past as a collection of inventions and memories, the present as the focus on what is happening today, and the imagined future as reasonable hypotheses. The first part, «the design that was not there», has the characteristic of a new trend, giving rise to many concrete solutions. It is characterized by the following points: the small size, the taste, the ironic vein, the minimalism, the “handcrafted dimension of artifacts”. The second part articulates hypotheses about the design of the future. Bringing into play the pairing of history and historiography, the discourse shifts to the conceptual aspect and, as such, it winds through a series of avenues that can be listed as follows: cultural reduction, design as mass-medium, full-on kitsch, the work of the digital, disposability, the hypothesis of the grotesque, the ugly makes art history.