Changing the change

Final Visualisations deadline expired on June 3rd, 2008. We received about 30 Visualisations of the selected papers. Now we are preparing the Exhibit at Changing the Change. On one hand, we applied the same clusters of the papers: visions, proposals and tools are the main themes of final Visualisations. Most of them are proposals and visions. On the other hand, we can identify different genres and languages for communicating design research. In particular, the exhibition will show photographic sequences and collages or graphs and diagrams.
Of course, the first ones are much more iconographic, visual and imaginative ways of representation. They can visualize subjects, showing actions and telling stories for stimulating the imagination. The second ones refer to a symbolic language, which is useful for defending a thesis. They are able to explain subjects, arguing theoretic thoughts and concepts, building relationships between issues and items. Their final result is abstraction. It is a rational way of communicating to peers, while the other language is much more intuitive and emotional and it can be understood by a wider audience. Of course, we can find also hybrid rhetoric and languages. We think that the brief format requested (35 secs) is an useful exercise of communication. It also allows getting a wide and complete look at the themes presented, stimulating the dialogue on urgent issues. Visualisations Exhibit will offer another way of looking at design research presented at Changing the Change.

Is it possible to organise an exhibition from design research results? Could this be useful in promoting the transition towards sustainability? In principle the answer should be yes: design research in general, and design research for sustainability, in particular, should generate visions and proposals in a highly communicative way. That is, it should produce high quality visual contents easily presentable in an exhibition. In practice, things are not exactly like that: for many years design research has been mostly oriented in other directions, i.e. towards theoretical and methodological studies. This kind of research is good and necessary, of course, but the result is that today, even though the number of design research conferences, journals and papers is growing, few proposals of new solutions and even fewer visions of possible futures are emerging as design research results. On the other hand, some designers who are developing visions and proposals very rarely consider themselves as researchers and their work as design research.

The Changing the Change initiative aims to promote and give higher visibility to the results of these formal and informal research projects. Therefore, in the process of selecting papers, a special consideration will be given to abstracts and papers presenting highly communicative visual contents.

However, this is only the first step. What we want to do is to organise, in parallel to the Conference, a design research exhibition, Changing the Change: visions and solutions, to make these visions and solutions more accessible, i.e. visible and understandable, to a wider public. For this reason, we are also calling for ad hoc visualisations to be used in the original exhibition we intend to organise. Similarly to the related papers, they may refer to different fields of application: from health, to food; from mobility to fashion; from caring for children to social services, but they must present a clear common denominator: they must show what it could be like to live and to produce in a more sustainable way.

For those who are familiar with traditional research conferences, it has to be underlined that the visualisations we are calling for here are not traditional scientific posters. Such posters are presentations on paper of the same contents as could otherwise have been presented orally at the conference. Here we are referring to visualisations that must be self-standing, highly communicative visions and proposals that must be accessible to the exhibition public at large. (for practical indications on how to submit a visualisation, see in the News and Notes section of this Newsletter and in the Changing the Change website).

The largest furniture industry in Japan has inaugurated, with Enzo Mari, a program called “Un milione di alberi di Sugi - One million Sugi trees”, a type of wood that grows widely and easily in Japan, used to re-propose furniture of the Japanese rural tradition. Alessi promotes Twergi series, small objects for the kitchen and table, manufactured by communities of craftsmen from some of the Alpine valleys in Piedmont and distributed with success worldwide. These examples, chosen among so many, stress the importance of the bond between industry and craftsmanship, tradition and local materials.

In this direction, in our Region we have attempted to work not with individual craftsmen but with a number of communities. We have established networks for knowledge and promotion, provided technological and business assistance to the enterprises. Rather than closed projects, because we know how much craftsmen value their independence, we provided “guidelines”, open to freedom of interpretation of the craft community in respect of certain shared rules. We have defined sustainable protocols for production, and outlined scenarios of consumption that configure products not exclusively for connoisseurs or nostalgics, but for everyone is able to appreciate quality. The territory, in this sense, becomes the first client of the typical craft product: the bars and restaurants, the offices of the institutional communities, the shops selling typical products like foods, are filled with new products, becoming the site of the promotion.
For this reason, “Artigianato Comunità Design” is the subtitle of the exhibition entitled MANUfatto that, if you come to Turin for the conference, we can visit together in the splendid framework of a historic but out-of-the-way location that, like typical craftsmanship, has the same problems of visibility, communication and survival.

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