Design and Communities: exploring rural territories

Abstract

Community Design is the result of a natural and healthy evolution in the broader sphere of design. While on the one hand design today still directs significant attention, care and resources to the design of objects, services and consumer products, sometimes useful and sustainable, sometimes neither useful nor ethical, on the other hand there is a thriving investment by the youngest designers in virtuous cultural, environmental and social processes of mediation, reconfiguration and interaction between communities and the territories they belong to, with a more humanistic than technocratic approach. A field in which the designer cooperates closely and throughout the entire design process with local residents in multidisciplinary groups, enriched with new experts in the humanities such as philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers. Through a couple of comparative case studies of projects run in Lebanon and Italy, the paper wants to discuss the importance for designers to use an anthropological approach for the development of new items, using the narrative tool to embrace the entire symbolic and rhetorical form of rural traditions in their projects. With regard to the narrative and experiential design approach applied in these projects, the anthropological concept that lies at the root of these experiments, of man as part of the environment, man understood as an organism within organisms, immersed in a continuous and swirling morphing of things, surfaces, volumes and therefore also of being, that can shape us too, and modify our work in a reciprocal relational interaction with the things themselves.