Re-Thinking the Design Role: Experimenting New Narrative & Rhetoric Design Methods

In thinking objects and spaces design produces symbols, cultural and aesthetic codes as a “cultural system”, which spreads innovation, embodied in new knowledge, products, values and lifestyles. It creates new meanings and, at the same time, it absorbs and modifies its rites and traditions; it renews the sense of things, it produces new mentalities. New visions of the world. Design is placed at the centre of a network of complex relations where the dominant features are “narrative” and “rhetoric”, which legitimize its products and modify design methods. In doing so, design elaborates and re-elaborates those design methods able to go beyond the dimension of technical gestures and of pure formal research, and access the unprecedented from within the routes traced by the ordinary. Many concepts developed within the design community have the strength to produce effects of meaning that transcend the boundaries of the discipline and spread to the wider socio-cultural system, bringing expert knowledge closer to the system of the collective imagination. The practice of planning is able to combine the richness of traditional techniques with new languages, redefining their characters and meaning. This article intends to focus on Design Storytelling as a true narrative expedient called upon to unify the objectual micronarrations in a single great story and, at the same time, to experiment with new cognitive, strategic and practical processes. Design guides the new processes of meaning (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991; Krippendorff, 2006) and introduces new design methods of innovating not only the form-function, but above all, the form-meaning.