Dissenting Design

Abstract

As part of the discipline and practice of design (understood in its broadest sense of «strategic problem-solving process that drives innovation, builds business success, and leads to a better quality of life through innovative products, systems, services, and experiences» ICSID, 2015), the conflict has always had a fundamental role as evolutionary impulse of genuine cultural regeneration that is expressed through the visions of artifacts, whether physical or cognitive, their meanings, their roles, practices and relationships, the imaginaries that they create or are associated with. Artifacts give voice, in their forms and in their behavior, to social and collective conflicts between worlds and between representations – Internal / external, past / present, tradition / innovation, individuality / standardization – and their pervasiveness, narrative force and creation of experiences, present themselves as messengers and interpreters at the same time, of dissensions and conflicts of contemporaneity. The speculative attitude of critical design, in example «uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life» (Dunne, Raby, 2013, p. 34): with their projects Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby challenge the power of consumerism, the brands and the use of pre-established objects; similarly fiction design (Sterling, 2005; Bleecker, 2009) represents and investigates dystopian worlds «in order to create a discursive space, where 'something' may mean 'anything'» (Lindley, Coulton, 2015, pp. 210-211). This translates concretely into “provocative” design forms, such as that of the Near Future Laboratory which offers a catalog of fictional objects, ie extra-ordinary prototypes that could be part of the normal daily life of the near future. The same visionary attitude, combined with the envisioning capacity of design, is rather typical of the DesignArt (Coles, 2005; Lupo, 2011) where technological, symbolic and relational aesthetic straddling art and design combine to generate artifacts according to a logic of disruptive innovation and a critical-conceptual attitude exemplified also by the exhibition “disobedient objects” (by designer Giulio Iachetti, held in Milan Triennale, 2008) «who rebel against the logic of consumption, sow doubts and who aspire to be something else». (Iacchetti, 2009). The essay aims to define, explore, critically and phenomenologically, the phenomenon of dissenting design as an act not simply oriented towards solutions and needs, but establishing conversation devices for an ongoing social, political and cultural commitment.