This exhibition, curated by world-renowned trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano, explores the way a new generation of designers is experimenting with materials and manufacturing processes.
Fully resonating with the public health crisis we are living through, it starts from the premise that if we do not take active steps to slow down consumption and reinvent our production practices, our planet will not stand a chance. The world is finally becoming future-thinking and reshaping the cultural landscape and changing its values along with it—as borne out by design.
We are developing new solutions for sharing between designer and artisan, designer and the underprivileged, designer and amateur, designer and designer. A new dawn brings hope for an alternative way to manufacture success, recognition and profit. Here the capital is human.
A labour of love.
Designers are buying or setting up proper factories, developing co-working spaces and sharing machinery, working in open-source ways and recycling materials piling up on our land and in our seas. The joy of manufacturing is palpable. These hubs of design, exchange and manufacturing are becoming successful cottage industries. The designer is at once artist, artisan and administrator, driven by a passion for every stage and aspect of his or her enterprise. This approach coincides with a significant emerging trend in philosophy—New Materialism—that states that all materials are alive and release energy.
The manufacture of reclaimed, recycled and invented materials supports this theory.
