Re-Designing designed objects: a laboratory about reuse
May 2015
Extending the thing’s life through maintenance and re-using what has already been designed: ways to respond responsibly to the waste crisis, beyond recycling. Because either the work and the time embedded in any existing artifact are valuable resources.
An experimentation, started in 2011 by Camilla Piccinini and some colleagues at the Capannori (Lucca) Centre for Reuse. Do-it-yourself stops being a solitary and isolated practice, to become a fully aware and strategic program: a way to re-think the cycle of use paradigm. Looking at the end of an artifact’s life as a brand new design opportunity becomes a way to question the waste system.
Re-Designing the designed is a way to extend the life of things: imagining a new life to anything ready for the dump, preserving signs and stories that objects accumulate, re-presenting their charm in a new functional opportunity.
The experimentation marks a path for design as a discipline: a way to escape the game of planned obsolescence moving towards a sense of awareness and responsibility that is in strong demand.
The designer discovers a new crafts dimension, becomes a direct maker operating on things that ask to saved, by re-inventing them. Through this re-design process, objects ready to be wasted regain value and a marketplace, so that can be sold or exchanged. A wise socio-political vision, that reconsiders the public costs of disposal at the end of an object’s life cycle, turns design in a non-exclusive exercise: prices are accessible and the dignity of labour is safe.
Marco Sironi
Designer and scholar at DADU
(Graphic) designer and scholar, focused on the idea of place, his background combines design skills and practice in literature. In Milan he has taught visual identity and basic design for graphics; collaborates with our Department (teaching Graphic and Product Design) since the beginning of the Design in Alghero venture.
