Share at Torino Geodesign

May 21, 2008 3:29 pm

A project and competition, Torino Geodesign is first and foremost an idea which defines an extraordinarily large and productive field of action: self-determined design, produced in limited series by communities inside huge globalised metropolises.

Share Festival and Bruce Sterling collaborated with Radio Flash, Odaoardo Fioravanti Sutudio and M.I.AFRICA to realize a african radio show, Radio Africa, and a gateway for the all the Torino’s africans, www.africancenter.it.

Design arising from a community of users organising restricted mass production to rapidly meet specific sorts of limited demand destined for instantaneous diffusion.
Vital, energetic and deeply experimental design, produced using poor materials and technology deriving from informal economies, and often full of symbolic content.
Highly creative design, which moves beyond the restrictive boundaries of international luxury production and meets precise needs linked to immediate survival or to lifestyles under constant change.

The project Torino Geodesign revolves around the collaboration between 40 communities in the area and a similar number of international designers and Italian companies.
Focusing attention on people instead of objects, Torino Geodesign aims to trigger off new forms of business enterprise in various local communities by setting up an intricate network of relations in which there is a blurring of the distinctions between customers and users, manufacturers and beneficiaries of design. In a dynamic system, a far cry from the idea of free aid or support, the designer becomes the catalyst of all kinds of experiments and reactions deriving from new forms of interaction.
The challenge behind this complex mechanism, where the traditional division of roles between the commissioning client, the designer and the consumer are tested, subverted and recomposed, is of an obviously political and social nature. The project aims in fact to seek out new energy for the world of design and new models for the relationship between city dwellers and city administration based on activating collective energy.
The designers, artists and architects, chosen through an international idea-seeking competition, work together with the communities in a series of design workshops on varying themes identified through a flexible, experimental process (magazines, packaging, brand images, objects for large-scale production such as clothes horses for council housing, the reorganisation of public areas).
The prototypes – together with sketches, designs, film and photos of the entire process – flow into a major show, the evidence of a new systematic way of organising design.