Exhibiting Design as a Process

This contribution explores the idea of exhibition formats, both physical and digital, dedicated to design and focused on narrating the experience of the design process. It begins in particular with the analysis of a selection of exhibition models to define the story of Italian industrial design – later simply “design” – as a process and not as an individual product, looking into museums such as the permanent collection of the ADI Design Museum in Milan, as well as opportunities for reconstructions or exhibitions beyond the confines of physical space which rely on the forms of digital archives. In this regard, the two selected case studies shed light on the possibilities offered by the combination of heritage digitisation and data interoperability technologies used to build archives. By making it possible to search a gigantic volume of information relative to materials that belong to different conservators – from institutions to individual users –, these solutions extend the possible construction of new and renewed storylines centred on reconstructing the design process. The cases studied here pertain to two research projects involving the Università Iuav di Venezia, based on materials from two archives. The first research project aims at the reconstruction of the Ettore Sottsass Jr. Archive, using partially unpublished documents preserved at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. This work was carried out in collaboration with the ARCHiVe Center – Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice, an initiative of the same Foundation. The second project, stemming from the POR-FSE 2014–2020 program financed by the Veneto Region, focuses on the Griffo typeface. It recovers and expands the knowledge derived from materials preserved at the Tipoteca Italiana Foundation in Cornuda (Treviso), the Library of the Accademia di Agricoltura, Scienza e Lettere in Verona, and the Stanley Morison Archive at the Cambridge Library. The contribution was selected through a call for papers and underwent a double-blind peer review process. It was presented at the international conference "Design! Objects, Processes, Experiences, Narratives", held at the University of Parma on May 5–6, 2022. The conference was organized by the University of Parma through the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Industries and CSAC (The Study Centre and Communication Archive), in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies of the University of Bologna, the Department of Humanities of the University of Palermo, the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano, and the Department of Engineering Enzo Ferrari at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The event aimed to stimulate and open a critical debate on the multidisciplinary aspects of design, focusing on four “dimensions”: objects, processes, experiences, and narratives.