Design innovation: synergy vs autarky.

The most emerging need seems to be to reinterpret the roles of the various forms of knowledge and their capacity to create innovation and progress. While Modernity was based on a plural model of knowledge, made up of autonomous specializations, today we are seeing the collapse of all disciplinary notions and the epistemic boundaries are less and less clear. Design is dramatically positioned in the heart of this collapse. As a result, who is responsible for providing design knowledge, proposes research experiences that are often feature practices and methods from other disciplines: from the social approach, as observation of results than actions, to the engineering approach, as study and experiment with new technologies. All too often, these approaches aren’t implemented in the social and productive system: companies, who are really responsible for putting design into practice, continue to follow market logic. R. Gold states that effective innovation springs from the synergy of 4 different creativity approaches - of the artist, of the scientist, of the engineer, of the designer - that can be interchanged or merged. Is it possible to recognize, in this synergy, the most interesting and prolific Design experiments? The paper, without any judgement, explores those productions of Design innovation, that go beyond any autarkic action, considering Design as driver of eco-system strategies based on synergy between independent economic, social and technological views.