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 involve two recent research studies finalized towards two archives: the project to reconstitute the Ettore Sottsass Jr. Archive based on the materials conserved at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, conducted by the Università Iuav di Venezia in collaboration with Centro ARCHiVe, and the case dedicated to the Griffo typeface, which retrieves and expands the material preserved at the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione.