S-Tiles - etica & estetica

ETHICS & AESTHETICS

“A choice is, in the end, an aesthetic vision: how is the world that we would like to have? Ethics and aesthetics should coincide to catalyse all the social actors towards a real engagement.”
[Ezio Manzini, Soluzioni sostenibili: design e imprese nella transizione verso la sostenibilità.”, blueindustry #2, in Form + action, Fantoni, 2001]

Designers have a fundamental role in the sustainable production scenario. They can indicate the best route to the company for achieving an ‘ecological’ product but, even before this, they can (and should) know how to grasp and stimulate those evolutions of taste that are more suitable to a general redirection of production and consumption towards sustainability.
It is clear that this supposes the extension of competencies traditionally linked to the discipline. It is not by chance that in the most advanced firms architects and designers work side by side together with anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and every other kind of professional requested for a specific project. This re-organisation of tasks, indispensable to understand and manage the incremental complexity of contemporary societies, also has the positive effect of contributing to putting into discussion the premises of design work.

Within this framework we can quote Ezio Manzini again: ” […] culture and economics – and with them creative and entrepreneurial capacities – should be able to move from the focus on ‘doing’ (imagined as always applied to ‘new and unexplored frontiers’) to the ‘re-doing’, the activity of re-qualifying the deteriorated habitats that are the result of the two centuries of war to environment that our industrial society has unwittingly produced.”