Resilient Professions. When Design practices become responsible

If we have to ask ourselves what the practice of Design will be like in the near future, we certainly need to observe the present and understand what the signs of changes are and try to project them in a prediction logic. The most evident sign that we cannot ignore is the ever more pressing acknowledgement of the inadequacy of the massive consu- mption system to which the contemporary society, at least that in countries with mature economies, had conformed and informed during the previous century. Design, born and developed in that same system, today is demon- strating the need for a rethinking and a change of its paradigms. At the level of critical theoretical reflection, this rethinking and change are by now a recognized fact, and possible evolutions have already been imagined. What we are interested in knowing here is whether and what changes are also taking place in the design practical dimension with which the designers express themselves and give their contribution to the social, cultural, productive and economic system. For this reason, the authors have opened an informal dialogue with two interesting Design realities that already in their nature seems to have the seed of change. Thanks to a reflective, critical, but equally germinative action, they have made their work and themselves “a field of experimentation” for the design of the near future. An interesting picture emerges where the keyword is “resilience”, understood here not in its political meaning of “resistance” but in the one closest to psychology that speaks of “positive reorganiza- tion”, of “sensitive reconstruction” of “enhancement of identity “. So here is a practice made up of ideas even more than forms, critical thoughts that as objects resiliently redesign the near future as if to answer the “levian” question of “if not now, when?”