Design Comes Out of Industry. New Critical Approaches for Design in the Economy of Post-Production

As the post-industrial era is investing in immaterial assets of knowledge, the labour of the mind comes to be the primary workforce capable of generating value. The category post-industrial does not get rid of industry itself, on the contrary, it refers to activities connected to the service industry, involving a knowledge based workforce (Bell, 1973; Rifkin, 2001; Gorz, 2003). The paper aims at understanding the shift brought by the democratization/digitalization of the tools of project and the technologies of production, which is leading to a redefinition of the approaches to education and its pedagogical goals (Imbesi, 2008; Levy, 1999). Then, the paper strives on the resulting blurring of disciplinary borders which, added to the multiplication of the Schools of Design in any part of the world, makes design become a “mass profession” for the management of processes rather than products (Imbesi, 2007). Design comes out of industry to state its presence in every social and aesthetic event. The new professional figure coming ahead has gone forward the notions of production and reproduction, referring to the serial products of the industrial era elaborated from raw material, to meet the notion of postproduction as the result of activities reworking preexisting products (Borriaud, 2002; Imbesi, 2009). Through a theory-based and design-based approach, the contribution aims at focusing the revision of the social role of project and its education towards innovation. The paper will trace the transdisciplinary/multidimensional critical matters coming from a research and didactic experience at Carleton University in Ottawa (Canada) displaying the social and anthropological issues connected with the transformation of the role of designer along with the rise of new technologies and the society of knowledge.