Piedmont is again a fertile ground for cultural development

7/1/2013 | TORINO.  It’s November, Saturday morning at Centro Congressi Torino Incontra. The Association Torino Design organizes the meeting “Turin Design Tomorrow”. At the welcome desk I find a special badge holder: it’s my “Molly”, selected as official gadget of the event and wisely reinterpreted by Paolo Maccarone, soul of the meeting and president of the Association.

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The topic of the event is both simple and complex: to pick up the heritage of the Turin World Design Capital 2008 and collect institutions, universities and companies to give a new perspective to the culture of the project in Turin. The topic seems local, but the spokesmen promise a general extensive interest. And the promise is widely kept.

After the welcoming, the event starts with a quality debate. Francesco Mazzarella (Turin Politecnico student) presents some examples of international “Design Centre”, selected for their different approaches, competences, tools, projects. It’s an interesting landscape, deepened adequately with a nice dynamism (as required for a meeting presentation).

Joan Vinyets (“A piece of pie Barcelona”) presents an ethnographic thought on the approach to the project, showing opportunities and difficulties that the crisis offers to us. He makes us pay attention to the risk of a “copy’n’paste” of the design approaches that surround us; he analyzes the phenomenon of the global and glocal markets; finally, he underlines the difficulties of the relationship between the different souls which give shape to the market
A change of “mindset” is needed in both personal and collective sphere: first of all we need to focus on
society, and he explains the needs of new kind of dialogues among these actors.
the goals, after that we can give vent to the creativity. A thousand ideas without a goal are just fruitless material and wasted energy.

Giorgio Casoni (Spinninvest) takes stock on the practical meaning of the (overused) word “startup”, describing the needed requirements and processes to put projects/ideas hubs into practice.

Flaviano Celaschi’s speech (Milan Politecnico) gives us a poetic and creative overview of the topic, assuming new ways to link the main stakeholders (companies, clients, universities) through an experiment of radical accessibility, where sharing and contamination permeate nature, skills and goals of the participants in the project, aimed at a total sharing level, that means a new archive of experiences, processes and relationships.

The final debate involves the representatives of the main institutions, companies and school of the territory, as well as ADI president Luisa Bocchietto. The topic seemed strictly local, but the vivacity (first of all Prof. Bistagnino’s one) and the prestige of the participants made the meeting interesting and full of cues even for people, like me, living in the North-east of Italy, a (not too much) different environment.

In the end, this meeting leaves us several working ideas, possible scenarios, but there’s a word that I recall spontaneously first: Bauhaus.

Know more:

• Associazione Torino Design Week

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Alessandro Barison
Read last SID & Companies: Operae, self-produced design

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