My thesis is now online the Texts section. I will also try to write some short posts that express briefly the thesis contents, so that you can understand all my post without reading all the thesis. I will start here telling you about the path I followed during its development.

In the last 7-6 years, the design community has started approaching the locality with growing interest. For the design community, the locality is to be intended as the whole characteristics of the territory where the project is developed and directed to. The territory of users and designers too: the territory of every stakeholder. Therefore, many initiatives have been developed in Europe and in Italy, with the purpose of redefining a relationship that (almost) have never been: the relationship between Design and Locality.
Produced by the Industrial Revolution and its Modernity, Design could be an example of how they always tried to reduce the complexity of the local dimension to exploit it. Traditionally, most of the designers think about economies of scale and mass production, and not about small production and local scale.
Coming from modern activities and theories, design follows their paths too: as they are becoming more interested in local dimension nowadays (maybe to manage globalization better), Design is now pretended to develop solutions (and/or new products and services) to local problems and opportunities.

Therefore locality become the place where new commercial and sustainable solutions can be found (to the problems old opportunities generated). Most of the economic theories, from the mainstream ones (development, and thus local development) to the more outsider ones (degrowth and thus localism), think of local dimension as the ideal place for every action in the future.
Whether conformist or radical, the future has a local dimension.

I’d like to reflect more on the relationships between Design and Economy (and between Economy and Locality, and Economy and Sustainability): but it seems to me that it’s very important now to point out how the relationship between Design and Locality is growing. And what interests me the most are the opportunities that this relationship can bring to the sustainability issue.

Two years ago I started my thesis with prof. Ezio Manzini as a tutor. To find a path I made an historical/bibliographical map to find how Economics, Marketing, Architecture, Urban Planning, Institutions and Design became interested in the local dimension. With this map I could choose a keyword useful to build the thesis: the most important keyword found was participation, as it was common to all the fields studied. It’s easy to understand why I became interested in communities…

(to be continued)