Edited by Derrick de Kerckhove and Gabriele Neri

From the remote control to the city, television has represented and continues to represent, even in its recent digital hybridizations, a “symbolic form” with which twentieth-century design culture has experimented multiple and complex paths, still little investigated by international historiography.

Against the background of classic and contemporary studies on television, this issue of “AisDesign Journal” aims to collect original and in-depth perspectives, providing a historiographical contribution on a topic that is still largely unexplored.

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Edited by Dario Mangano and Ilaria Ventura Bordenca

The issue aims to explore the relationships that have emerged, historically, between design and semiotics. The approaches of the contributions can be twofold: on the one hand, the exploration of the Structuralist perspective in its connections with the field of design, the debate on design, its use in didactics and the resulting outcomes, and on the other hand the use of semiotics as a key to interpreting design in different design traditions. The aim is to question how the science of signs (and their meanings) has influenced the work of designers and historians in Italy and elsewhere, and which paths can still be followed.

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** deadline extended: 7 January 2023 **

Number 19 of “AIS/Design. Storia e ricerche” aims to explore the ways in which the culture of design over the 20th century has addressed – through theories, proposals, and projects – the topic of environmental sustainability and, more generally, the limits to the use of resources.

Since the initial phases of technological development in the 19th century, the discipline of design has been both an operational tool in the industrial production model, and a field of mediation between industrialisation and the imbalances it produced in the man-made environment. According to Vanni Pasca, this has created a dual identity in the culture of design: one consumerist, oriented towards development and competitive improvement; and the other critical, committed to speaking out about its limits and contradictions. The former has tried to solve problems from within the industrial system, while the latter has openly declared itself as anti-establishment.

In his dual role as designer-entrepreneur in the design world and lecturer-critic of industrialisation, William Morris certainly contributed to preempting some of the themes related to both the role of design in improving the quality of the environment (objects, the home, the city, and even the organisation of the countryside), and the duty of intellectuals and artists to fight against the harmful effects of industrialisation. (Morris, 1883). While Fabian socialism and Marxism in Europe were focused on themes of the living conditions of the working class (“The Housing Question” by Engels is from 1872) and the first environmentalist movements in America were primarily advocates for conservation of natural areas, opposing the systemic destruction of resources with the philosophy of the wilderness (Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman), Morris shifted attention to the relationship between industrialisation and the environment: thanks to him and other intellectuals of the Victorian era, such as Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford, a more holistic culture made headway, considering the environment as part of an ecosystem to be protected.

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2022 marks the 50^th anniversary of the most ambitious—even in the quantitative sense—exhibition on Italian design ever organized: Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. Curated by the Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz, the show was held at New York’s MoMA between May and September 1972.
The details of the show are well documented both in the press coverage and collective memory. 160 objects and fourteen environments (eleven commissioned; the other three the outcome of a competition for young designers). The objects were selected by Ambasz and the other MoMA curators with economic and organizational support provided by the Italian Institute for Foreign Commerce and by numerous technical sponsors to the tune of $1.5 million U.S. dollars: at that time, the largest sum ever dedicated to a MoMA show.
The response to the exhibition was uniformly favorable among audience members or critics, drawing headlines like MoMa Mia, That’s Some Show.

Over the past half century, scholarship on the exhibition has focused on the environments (where the radical ambitions of the period are palpable), exceptional works by major figures (Sottsass, Aulenti, Bellini, Rosselli…), and on the exploration of the critical and political dimensions of projects openly engaged in a critique of the consumer economy.

The special issue of AIS/design Journal invites scholars in the fields of design, architecture, communications, and production history to approach this epochal exhibition from less familiar vantage points such as:

• critical writings published in accompanying publications, the Italian and international press (both general and specialized), and, naturally, the exhibition catalog itself.
• the role of the companies involved in the realization and support of the show.
• the juxtaposition of exhibition sections and taxonomies, read from the standpoint of the show’s protagonists.
• the show’s articulation of a structured approach to design practice, examined against the backdrop of period debates in Italy.

Ambasz’s ambitions were immodest. He sought not only to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of design’s “Italian Job” but to strategically position Italian design with rigor and originality within a broader global context.

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