From territories to communities. A new perspective for Made in Italy.

The article presents the preliminary results and development paths outlined within the ongoing PhD research in the field of Made in Italy. The work is focusing on the evolution of the relationship between “design and territories”, in connection with the emerging concept of community and the settling of digital culture. During the first stage of study of the existing literature, the research deepened the concept of Made in Italy in its historical meaning that combines the cultural, productive, and economic identities of the Italian national context, then proceeding with an evolving study on the relationship between “design and territory”. This binomial was the core of the socio-economic definition of industrial districts of the early 1950s that attributed production to circumscribed geographical contexts, while later assumed a more systemic dimension, as highlighted by the first design academic research carried out in the late 1990s. In this phase of recognition of the state of art, the bibliographic survey revealed the shaping of a new reading of the relationship between design and territories: considering the settling of digital culture and the need to address global challenges, the conception of territorial boundaries is erased while the building up of distributed and collaborative networks between communities is enhanced. The new perspective then emerging sees the community at the center of the design process in the development of territory, at local and global scale. As a first result of the literature research, a categorized bibliographic collection has been developed, to define the different design’s fields of action in this context.