Designing Culture-intensive Artefacts. How the Design Process Interprets Craft Reiteration to Build Future Diversities.

Abstract

The paper approaches the subject of traditional craft and local know-how from the perspective of design practice. The specific focus is on those fields of design that produce the so-called culture-intensive goods (Hesmondhalgh, 2002; Bovone and Mora, 2003), such as fashion, home goods and food. They are the result of recombination by design of a specific cultural capital into new shapes and meanings. Thanks to "Made in Italy" best practices context selected in those fields, the paper will discuss how design shapes future artefacts rooted in the reinterpretation of the past. On one hand, accessing craft culture and its reiterative attitude of transmission of identity and tradition along times. On the other hand, recombining craft processes into reconfigured practice, encoding different meanings into new narratives.