Resistere creativamente. Il design di denuncia politica

In this work we aim at investigating categories of product design in terms of cultural communication by exploring artefacts conceived with the intent of encouraging users’ reflection upon “conflict” issues. Under this light, we have chosen case studies referred to those conflicts in which walls and fences are still separating populations one from another, as for Palestine, Mexico, etc. The conflict is here read as an event that is able to encode expectations of emancipation, and because of that it becomes central for articulating significant transitions. Such artefacts, rather than for their functionality or utility, might be interpreted through the Stephanie and Bruce Tharp theory of discursive design, where objects are treated like transmitters of ideas and messages. We believe that discursive design can be a good starting point for better understanding the value of the semantic content spread by objects within time and space, and that artefacts can be considered as specific agents of communication. Therefore, if we consider objects as communicative facts, then we can use tools taken from the field of logics and linguistics in order to analyse the semantic and the cultural length of the objects themselves. As a consequence, politically engaged design tends to broaden the role of designers into an intellectual one, being able to boost debates around the issues designers trigger.