Anna Maria Fundaro's 'Design for Development'

In this essay, we introduce Anna Maria Fundarò (1936-1999), one of the first woman appointed as full professor of Industrial Design at the Italian University. From the 70’ to 90’, her intellectual work made a significant contribution to the debate on the new design discipline with the concept of “Design for development”. This paper analyzes Fundarò’s role in the mediation of design culture. Working in Sicily, a backward and underdeveloped region, her commitment has been focused on the “need” of design as a means of a systemic development between production and social innovation to shape the future of a territory. The reading of her work is completed with information about her relationship with designer and intellectuals from different cultural realities to import new ideas at the University of Palermo. Her design vision still represents an original point of view on the role of design discipline in relation to the context of application, in a perspective of exchange and comparison between the periphery and the centre.