Cosmopolitan Localism: The Cultural Side of a Resilient Sustainable World
Thursday 10 November 2016, 17:00 to 19:00
In English
Free admission
Until now, the discussion on resilience and sustainability has mainly adopted technical, economic, functional points of view. But even though these approaches are important and necessary, they are not enough. If resilience and sustainability must be a characterizing feature of every potential future society, its cultural dimension must be considered too.
In this talk, Ezio Manzini introduces the notions of distributed systems and cosmopolitan localism and discusses the possibility of using design tools to connect and reinforce them, outlining an emerging design scenario and the new cultural fabric needed to implement it.
Ezio Manzini is the Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano and a guest professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, and Jiangnan University, Wuxi. He has been working in the field of design for sustainability for more than two decades. Recently, his work has focused on social innovation as a major driver of sustainable changes, and the means through which design can support it. Manzini is also the founder and coordinator DESIS, an international network of design schools and other design-related organizations that are active in the field of design for social innovation and sustainability. His most recent book Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (MIT Press) was published in 2015, and has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Korean.