You can always count on college students for the reminder that print is punk. In the thesis project We Mix Design and People, Torino students Giulia Zanzarella, Lorenzo Musacchio, and Mattia Serratrice provide an empathetic manifesto for design with a classic DIY look. This comprehensive guide examines design’s impact on the larger world and aims to bring a community-oriented mindset back into the field. The book’s simultaneously funky and sleek aesthetic finds a perfect middle ground between grassroots authenticity and high-quality design. It’d look equally at home on the shelf of a distro or at the gift shop of a modern art museum.
WE MIX DESIGN AND PEOPLE
Is it possible to face contemporary social challenges through visual communication?
Design is a transversal, changing and complex discipline. In recent decades, the way we look, think and interact with society has changed, and with it the way we plan and the objectives to be achieved. Social design cannot be superficially reduced to a mere notion: this volume attempts to dissect the subject in order to understand its secrets, meanings and the possibilities it offers, with the aim of transmitting its potential to the public. Design can be community, culture, education, social commitment and knowledge.
We Mix Design And People: mixing design and people, contaminating design with different cultures, integrating visual communication with new knowledge and disciplines.
Credits
Project developed as part of Graphic Days® Torino
Graphic and editorial design: Giulia Zanzarella, Lorenzo Musacchio, Mattia Serratrice
Thesis supervisor: Fabio Guida
Exhibition design: Graphic Days®, Giorgia Aguiari, Giulia Zanzarella, Lorenzo Musacchio, Mattia Serratrice
Curators: Giulia Zanzarella, Lorenzo Musacchio, Mattia Serratrice, Fabio Guida
Direction: Fabio Guida, Ilaria Reposo
We Mix Design And People is the title of the exhibition designed for the sixth edition of Graphic Days®, but it is also the fil rouge that summarizes the modus operandi of the Print Club Torino association and is the common denominator of all editions of the festival. From a simple but effective mantra, We Mix Design And People becomes an exhibition and evolves into a manifesto: a declaration of intent that becomes a project through an operational toolkit.
The exhibition in the context of Graphic Days Touch® has played the role of container in order to show to a wide audience the best social design practices of the last two years (2019-2021), but it is only one of the design outputs that can arise from reflection on the topic. In fact, we are looking towards the future. The heart of the project consists in the drafting of a theoretical-planning manifesto, which summarizes the values and principles of the discipline and which can function as a guide and fertile ground for the creation of new future projects. An indelible but open document, in evolution, which can be a picture of the initial intentions and at the same time a place where future ideas can grow.
Together with the theoretical manifesto, a toolkit was created to simplify the approach to design for social innovation, with the ultimate goal of making the discipline of social design increasingly widespread and accessible to the designers of tomorrow, by teaching them how to design for the common good.
