DESIGN, INFORMAL ECONOMY AND MATERIAL CULTURE

This short essay will explore the relationships between project, material culture and informal economy today. It is a vexed question that if seen through the lens of design history it has its roots in the Arts and Crafts and in the workshops of Victorian England and, on the Italian side, long ago in time, in the craftsmen masters of the communal era. Meanwhile, we need to clarify the doubts about the meaning of the informal economy by borrowing a recent definition of Arnaldo Bagnasco: “if we call formal economy the processes of production and exchange of goods and services regulated by the market and typically carried out by industrial and commercial profit-oriented enterprises, operating under the rules of business law, tax, labor, then we could call informal economy all those processes of production and exchange that tend to escape one or more aspects of these distinctive characteristics.” Also, we will try to understand how an economic model rooted in a region can really influence the design of products / services and the spatial organization of a community.