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Subjects
TWDC 2008 - Torino Geodesign
The Torino Geodesign projects aims to exploit the design skills of “practising communities”. An exchange of ideas between forty communities (not only ethnic but also those with the same interests and culture) and designers (leading protagonists and young designers) and companies within a set of experimental laboratories in order to construct objects, environments and services able to meet their needs, but which also express their ability to create, to propose.
A truly mixed bunch of project topics – magazines, packaging, brands, objects to be produced in series such as clothes drying racks for low-income residential areas, public spaces to be reorganized - has been identified through a flexible, experimental process, while the designers, artists, architects who work together with the communities in the design workshops have been selected through a major international competition of ideas. The participants are asked to design new folding, mobile stalls or roofing systems for the street merchants of the most important market of the city, flexible landing stages that can be quickly assembled for rowing regattas on the river, or systems for drying clothes in the small apartments of a lower-income residential area now being renovated or sturdy, agile mega-screens for outdoor projection of films in the squares of the more densely populated areas. In other cases, they will be involved in catering to more complex desires and needs, such as cohabitation strategies for students participating in the Erasmus project, the design of a radio and magazine-network for the more than 180 different ethnic groups present in Torino in cooperation with a group of students from Albania, the design of packaging for Chinese herbal products, the invention of musical instruments for Capoeira or reinventing traditional accessories for Turkish baths (hammam).
The prototypes – together with the sketches, designs, videos and photos of the entire process – will be on show at the great exhibition to be held from May at Palafuksas, in the heart of Porta Palazzo, reflecting a new systematic method of approaching design.
Torino Geodesign is project and a competition and much more; it is an idea that defines an extraordinarily broad, active field of action: “self-organized” design produced in small series by the communities who populate the huge globalized megalopoleis.
Highly creative, vital, energetic and intensely experimental design that stems from communities of users who organise small series production in order to provide a prompt response to restricted, precisely-defined needs, intended for instant diffusion.