Less, more or plenitude? Design in the age of plenitude

Design, as practice and discipline, was born and substantiated in the productive dimension of the industrial society. A dimension that has changed due to the social, economic and technological and cultural changes. When the famous phrase “less is more” was coined, Mies van der Rohe considered the '900 the age of the economy, of science, of technology where nothing more could happen that was not observable by man. In this condition, Mies evoked order and rationality as the true expression of the era to which the design action had to respond, just as in the past it had responded to other “expressions”. Thus, the “less is more” by Mies, since its enunciation, exceeded the limit of simplicity against complexity, or aesthetic and formal minimalism against decorative richness. Above all, it was an exhortation to the need to respect order and rationality that as such could not accommodate more than what they envisaged in their structure. Years have passed and many different boundary conditions and this declaration of intent by Mies has never been forgotten either to bring it to the fore or to refute it, always and in any case declining it to specific opportuni- ties. If we want to reopen the question, as this issue of DIID wants to do, freeing the reflection of the conjunction particle between the concepts of less and more, in the field of artefact design we have to evaluate the specific context in we are working in: in order to understand what less and more are today, and if, as this contri- bution will try to analyse, there is another quantitative condition, capable of paradigmatically subverting the meaning of the terms.