One of the most prolific individuals to emerge from Italy’s radical period was Enzo Mari. In an interview in 2014, before even being asked a question, he began with: “Would you like me to reveal a secret straightaway? I realize it’s a suicidal thing to say, but I’m going to do it anyway: I’m a communist.” Mari came out of the gate with this statement to set the tone for his entire philosophy of design as an inherently political activity: in a much earlier interview, he had stated, “Political activity consists of bringing others round to one’s own position. Isn’t that perhaps the shared goal of design?”
Frustrated with the growing culture of consumerism in the early 1970s, Enzo Mari embraced a new approach to the design of everyday objects. His manual Autoprogettazione offered easy-to-construct models of tables, chairs, beds, and other household furniture from ready-made cuts of lumber. A precursor to the open-source movement, the published drawings and instructions in the manual meant to empower people to become their own makers and perhaps in the process to modify his designs and become their own designers. This approach to design is both pedagogical and political. The objects people would make from his designs were intended to be more valuable because of their own participation, including the knowledge and skills that were to be gained. Meanwhile, this activity creates a vision of design decoupled from centralized control over production, the generation of false desires, and the exploitation of profit central to a consumer-capitalist system. Mari: “The first problem facing a designer is to define his own model of an ideal world, and not to create an aesthetic. … The designer cannot fail to have his own ideology of the world. If he has none, he is a fool who only gives shape to other people’s ideas.”
— —
see also: https://makezine.com/2013/04/20/enzo-maris-autoprogettazione/
👉 Home