Copy & Paste: Design in the Era of Postproduction

The rise of knowledge society along with the diffusion of new technologies and software, has opened a form of “democratization” of the creative professions, at the same time allowing an easier management of each stage of the project. While increasing its creative capabilities and enlarging its community, design is spreading as a “mass profession” and at the same time lowering its authorship role in society. The designer cannot act anymore the role of the hero for creating unique artworks just by manipulating raw materials, moreover he works as a DJ or a VJ, remixing and reprogramming preexisting shapes and languages already circulating into new contexts. While starting the era of postproduction, technologies give the chance of recording/sampling/reproducing/elaborating parts of images, shapes, languages, texts, sounds already existing after an action of creative manipulation which gives a free reorganization and interpretation and creates copies altering the first original. Notions of production and reproduction, master and copy, same and different, originality and replica are blurred through the concept of postproduction, which summarizes and overcomes them all. The paper will focus postproduction as a cultural shift which works through a process of “copy and paste” on recorded materials far from boundaries of copyright and methodologically brings closer the activities of production and consumption. Through a transdisciplinary theory-based and design-based approach, linking design, social and communication sciences, anthropology, cultural studies, the paper will display how new technologies and their accessibility and ease of use make the designer create new products informed from preceding products through an act of consumption. Therefore designers, due to an act of productive consumption, enrol a new social role by selecting cultural artifacts and giving them new contexts (of elaboration/production/use) and opening to ever new catalogues of shapes which can be collectively shared.