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“We’re interested in the ways design grows from people and places, in a generative process loosely led by needs and instinct and only later, shaped and into legible circumscribed solutions”

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read here the issue 76 

read here the academic paper 

With the term “Endogenesis”, we aim to highlight design practices and expressions that come from within, bottom-up dynamics, and understand where design belongs as a native species. The focus is dedicated to empirical and vernacu-lar knowledge, first-hand experimentations, and to chase a kind of design that is owned by people and not vice versa. A space in which to question aesthetics and revisit our semiotic biases in matters of form and beauty. Speaking in biological terms, issue 76 aims for a reflection around design as an endogenous act, that lives and grows in specific con-texts, rather than being an exogenous element implanted in existing systems with a high risk of rejection.

“There is a different tradition in design that we have learned to know through the application of ethnography, anthropology, natural studies, climate studies and the study of complex social relations. This tradition flows like a river underground and occasionally rises to the surface carrying with it profound results that help us to understand design reality. What we are studying in issue number 76 of diid is a subterranean river that requires scrupulous and attentive researchers with uncommon delicacy and sensitivity to discover, understand and scientifically convey the phenomena that derive from it. We are quite far from a quantitative and experimental performance analysis, from historical research in the archives, the phenomenology of the user’s analysis and the use of the sophisticated technologies that enable the contemporary designer. Here the discussion is about how form, function, value and meaning retreat from market logic yet transform the behaviour and structure of society or individuals in a global and contemporary manner through the cultures of design and its practices.Paolo Cardini has orchestrated this observation by highlighting a community of researchers who are studying and applying these themes at the intercontinental level, and with the awe-struck curiosity of children we remain drawn to and pensive before the array of images that illustrate this issue”.
(Flaviani Celaschi)