Design tra ecologia politica e ambientalismo “scientifico”. Dalle esperienze degli anni settanta al contributo di Ezio Manzini

Abstract

The paper examines the ways in which, during the 1970s, Italian design culture addresses the impact on health and the environment generated by the overpro- duction of objects and artifacts and illustrates some of the policy positions and operational proposals formulated by designers as solutions to these problems. After a general framing of the Italian context and the cultural and ideological debate that passing through it, the essay examines a series of theoretical formulations and projects published in the early 1970s in Casabella magazine, and eventually traces a possible line of continuity between the research of those years and the contribution made, in this field of design, by Ezio Manzini in the 1980s and 1990s. The aim is to clarify the ways and forms in which the Italian project culture absorbed and metabolized many of those instances of change, engaging, at the main time, on a “contestative” front and on a propositional one of alternative development models.