Flaviano Celaschi

Flaviano Celaschi’s research activities have focused in recent years on the following thematic areas, which sometimes intersect.

In general terms, the theme that interests him most is the culture of process within design. Prof. Celaschi’s polytechnic approach and research experience in the field have led him to develop an instrumental separation between “product culture” and “process culture” within the wide sphere of design culture.

Prof. Celaschi believes it is vitally important for the future of design, and the benefits that design can bring to people and to the environment, that the process culture should assume greater importance with respect to the product culture, which now prevails.

Thus Prof. Celaschi’s approach to design runs the gamut from training professional figures, to publishing, to formulating practical plans for companies and organisations – important steps towards an innovative product culture and new kinds of interaction between consumer and contemporary goods.

Following are some of Flaviano Celaschi’s interests:
CONTEMPORARY COMMODITY ECONOMICS
Goods are the cornerstone for Prof. Celaschi’s design philosophy. From the undifferentiated products exchanged for money on the marketplace which were the subject of the earliest pre-Marxist political and economic thinking, he follows the path which has led goods to become the basis of modern society and processes for exchanging goods to invade every moment and every sphere of the contemporary lifestyle of post-modern man.

The keywords in Prof. Celaschi’s philosophy are: contemporary goods (to be distinguished from modern goods); market exchange (the location where, and process by which, exchange choices take place and conditions for exchange are established); evolving desires and needs; and value (a fundamental element for exchange).

The synthesis of these ideas is the model of design as a mediator of know-how (Celaschi, L’uomo al centro del progetto, 2008), requiring the designer to govern the mix between these factors: meaning, value, form, and function.

Prof. Celaschi introduced the term merceologia contemporanea (“contemporary commodity economics”) into the international debate in 2000, with in his book Il Design della Forma Merce. The term was intended to define a field in design culture, and the book investigates goods and their capacity to be transformed by the design culture, which is in turn linked to the humanities, arts, production technologies, economics and management.

FIELDS OF STUDY
Prof. Celaschi has studied the evolution of contemporary commodity economics from the standpoint of three sectors or productive areas which he believes are particularly salient, and which illustrate the excesses and peculiarities in the contrast between globalisation and local culture.

The world of LUXURY GOODS, MADE IN ITALY, and CULTURAL ASSETS reflect the complexity of the debate, and of the phenomena which it attempts to explore.

Luxury goods are a vast family of goods that possess the interesting capacity to enhance exponentially the consumer’s perception of their value; the buyer is prepared to pay a price that is out of all proportion to the actual cost of producing the article in question, thus satisfying a personal need that is both irrational and anomalous.

The typical Made in Italy products – particularly food, vehicles, clothing and accessories, and furnishings – are another area in which Prof. Celaschi looks for recurrent characteristics of the phenomenon. His interest is focused on the features that all of these sectors have in common, and that might indicate a shared way of thinking about and implementing design.

Finally, Prof. Celaschi seeks to analyse the complex category of cultural assets, which are becoming more and more a part of the world of “goods”. Nowadays cultural assets must be made accessible to users, and designers can make a significant contribution to this process. Furthermore, the process by which goods and cultural assets are brought closer together is instrumental for identifying what elements allow a product realised by a designer to be likened to a true cultural asset.

These themes are explored in the book Lusso versus Design (“Luxury Versus Design”) (Celaschi, Cappellieri, Vasile, 2005), as well as the publications in the 5th issue of “SDI Design Review” of Sistema Design Italia.

METADESIGN AND DESIGN PROCESSES
By metadesign Prof. Celaschi means two distinct but interrelated questions. First of all metadesign is the phase of observing reality and creating a synthetic model; these moments precede, in the design method, a third phase which will transform reality, and require the designer to analyse and understand the problems he has been asked to solve.

Metadesign according to this definition is the difference between a scientific approach to the project and a more personal, artistic approach.

But metadesign is also awareness on the part of the designer that he must not only find a design solution to the problem at hand, but also define the project’s path, adapt and perfect analysis and work methods, and give primary importance to the culture of process – because each project is part of a context of resources, time constraints, historical period, author, and client, all of which are different and unique. Hence the method must always be flexible; one might say that metadesign is the continuous redesign of the design method.

The concept of metadesign is developed by Prof. Celaschi in various publications between 2000 and 2008, but is better defined in the book Design e Innovazione (“Design and Innovation”) (Celaschi, Deserti, 2007). It is further focused around the concept of “mediating design” in Celaschi’s essays in Uomo centro del progetto (“Man at the centre of design”) (edited by Germak, 2008).

THE LANGUAGES OF DESIGN
Prof. Celaschi is currently investigating the idea that the process of design is approximative; the designer’s task is to safeguard the intuition and the original idea behind the concept, notwithstanding the problems encountered (both practical and semantic) during the various steps needed to transform the concept into reality.

Of particular importance is the search for a scriptographic and infographic language that will give the designer the linguistic instruments he needs to support his decisions and to share them throughout the project.

DESIGN SYSTEMS
Prof. Celaschi is currently pursuing the vision that Alberto Seassaro has studied in connection with the building sector (Storia e struttura del settore edilizio in Itaia dal dopoguerra a oggi, edited by Seassaro, 1979). It is a structuralistic vision that seeks to describe the design phenomenon in Italy as “a system of relationships”, made up of integrations between components and subjects, roles and figures, and the interplay among various specific interests.

Seassaro’s work during the 1990s at the Politecnico di Milano led to the concepts of “Sistema Design Milano” and “Sistema Design Italia”, meaning complex systems of interactions in which hundreds of individuals participate to achieve the desired result.

This vision contains elements that represent a radical departure from the common interpretation of Italian design as the fruit of isolated “poets of the pencil” and courageous “captains of industry”. Prof. Celaschi’s participation in the birth and development of the Design Faculty at Politecnico di Milano, with its complex internal and international network of relationships, has progressively led him to develop the idea that these issues must be investigated today at a trans-national scale, in the complex relations that exist between developing and industrialised countries within the globalisation process.

It is in this global context that Prof. Celaschi has developed a growing interest and experience in the Latin countries of Europe and South America as locations to study the complex relationship between the industrialised world and newly-developing nations (BRIC nations). He actively promotes the Latin network of design processes, endorsed in the “Charter of Torino” stipulated in July 2008 as part of the activities of Torino 2008 World Design Capital. This will be the start of a permanent forum for experts, academics and businessmen from nine Latin countries in Europe and the Americas who are interested in making a cultural investment in process design and in developing a “Latin Design Sysem” to spread the process culture.

DESIGN AS MEDIATOR
A structuralist vision is now taking shape, in which Prof. Celaschi’s research on design is concentrated on system design and on the associations between the knowledge, needs, interests, and objectives of the various players populating the contemporary consumer scenario.

Within this system, the role of design appears particularly important; being a young discipline and not yet institutionally structured in a rigid way, it is more a collection of practices than a set of fixed statutes. This position of weakness imposes a mediating role on design and designers.

Prof. Celaschi’s research interest therefore focuses on the tools that favour connections, interactive practices and integration of opportunities: mediation expertise that is not only economic and technological but also linguistic. Design is observed and used as a connector among components of a system within the tumultuous modern world in which globalisation is playing out its quiet revolution.

This vision, currently being tested and demonstrated, can be synthesized in the idea that design is first and foremost about relationships. Relationships between interests (of producer and consumer, but also mediator and environment), between needs (psychological, sociological, economic, biological, anthropological, etc.), and among areas of knowledge (humanities, technology, art, economics and management).

What needs to be understood is whether the work of contemporary designers can be represented in terms of a fusion, a relationship between meaning, value, form and function.

KEY WORDS
The key words identifying Flaviano Celaschi’s research are as follows:

DESIGN DRIVEN INNOVATION
Innovation in contemporary goods is largely driven by advances in technology, by changes in consumption and lifestyle behaviours, or by the evolution of the language of communication.

Design can intervene in all three areas, but it plays a primary role in leading innovation, starting from the study of consumption and lifestyle behaviours and the changing language of communication. When the design culture identifies or even anticipates needs and desires, thus enabling the production system to market new products or services, this process is called “design-driven innovation”.

METADESIGN
Metadesign is the primary phase of the complex act of designing, which involves observation of reality and construction of simplified models of this reality. However by metadesign we also mean the designer’s capacity to intervene in the nature and form of the design process itself, with the aim of adapting it in creative and sensitive ways to the requirements of the context and the problem to be resolved.

Thus the designer who is aware of metadesign methods can continuously modify and adapt his design methods to the objective at hand.

GOODS
Goods are assets that can be bought or sold through the exchange of money. Goods are the basis of the exchange process, and are the reason for the relationship between producer, mediator and consumer.

Contemporary goods can be defined as goods that possess an immaterial dimension that is increasingly important, acting on desires more than on actual needs, and simultaneously satisfying human dimensions ranging from psychological to sociological, anthropological, semiologic, historic, and economic. Contemporary goods consist not only of tangible objects, but of all those elements that form part of a market exchange system and are purchased with money (a cultural asset enjoyed, a territory that sells itself as a tourist attraction, a person’s image, a brand name, etc.)

DESIGN AND CULTURAL ASSETS
The system of cultural assets is evolving rapidly towards usability on the part of consumers. It is worthwhile reflecting on the transferability of disciplines and competencies which have been developed around tangible goods, and which can now be applied to cultural assets as well. For this reason we speak of marketing of cultural assets, design and communication of cultural assets, etc. The relation between design and cultural assets is useful not only to enhance and promote those assets; it also provides an indispensable opportunity for design to develop the ability to make a useful contribution to a type of goods that by nature are increasingly complex.

PRODUCT SYSTEM
This is the complex system that encompasses all the dimensions and functions linking producer to consumer. It includes both the physical-material dimension of the goods exchanged, and the service and communication dimensions.

DESIGN AS MEDIATOR
Nowadays the design culture finds fertile terrain for application in the mediations between producer and consumer. The system of mediation between these two sets of interests has grown enormously, and dominates in many everyday situations. Thus it must be underlined that the most interesting developments in the coming years will be in design applied to services.

DESIGN MANAGEMENT
The process leading to design-driven innovation must be conceived, orchestrated, implemented, represented, assessed, developed, tested, and so forth. Design management is the care and management of this process, both to keep it efficient and to develop consistency and continuity in the value chain.

ADVANCED DESIGN
In the volatile contemporary world of consumerism, it is ever more frequently necessary to acquire a reservoir of ideas to be developed within the business sphere, anticipating signs of change whenever possible. Advanced design operates scientifically to create scenarios within which the most significant concepts can be identified.

TRENDS
Changes in customs and language forms are continuous. Design must periodically analyse this flow in order to re-set its expressive and design language according to the prevalent sensitivities and tastes, called trends or tendencies, even when it does not wish to follow these trends.

SUPERCONSTANTS
A hypothesis that is being tested in a number of case studies is that in man’s social existence there are certain long-term narrations or metanarrations that are always the same, and that are periodically staged in various configurations. These narrations, which remain constant throughout time, are known as “superconstants”. They determine the supporting architecture for the stories that mankind wants to experience or tries to escape from, according to a ritual that is repeated identically over the years, decades and centuries.