Future Factory. New Design skills in the era of post-craft.

Today the online marketplace encourages an increasingly ‘Long Tail’ economy, as Chris Anderson (2006) calls the growing share of niche products opposed to mass manufactured goods. Design has embraced this evolution, in particular due to the crisis of large-scale production in favour of low-volume production, acting locally while thinking globally. Therefore, the Long Tail phenomenon causes the designer efforts to shift as well, towards creating uniqueness and experimenting various goals and approaches. We assist to different Design approaches to this phenomenon: a) on one hand there is the tendency to substitute the Design Skill with new ones (i.e. Makers); b) on the other, a faithful revival of traditional craft techniques and archetypes seems to reply to an environmental-cultural attitude which wants to bring Design back to a pre-industrial condition. The paper reports an experimental project carried out at our Laboratory in order to investigate this phenomenon and imagine a possible evolution of the Design Skill. According to our interpretation, creating authentically crafted unique artefacts in a digitally literate age requires the use of state-of-art tools both on the physical level (digital fabrication) and, even more importantly, on the intellectual level: from computationally tailor-made objects to algorithmically generated ornaments.