Italian Pavilion at XXII Triennale di Milano

On the occasion of the XXII Triennale di Milano, dedicated to the environmental and social issues concerning our planet, Politecnico di Milano was asked to represent Italy at the national pavilion. A general concept emerged: the enhancement of technical innovation to heal and fight contemporary concerns, the goal of taking care of the planet as well as of the health and safety of mankind and of the built environment, all belonging to nature and landscape and part of the same wider ecological system. An interactive library shows a multidisciplinary Design approach, facing critical contemporary issues and caring solutions, organized around the four natural elements and different dimensional scales of impacts. The paper analyses the role of Design in this particular context, both (1) as healer and leader within the most of researches (content/message) and (2) as a visualizer (exhibit/language) making the scientific research more accessible. This paper addresses the second topic in more depth. (1) On the one hand Design, explained Antonelli, has the tools to become the catalyst for different skills and to describe alternative ways of solving the world’s great problems. Design balances human impact and tries to take care of the nature and the environment, moving in between Art and Science (Oxman, 2018). As emerging from the featured projects, Design is conceived as methodological approach to envisage and select among potential future scenarios through feasibility criteria and to manage and reinterpret the limited resources of existing contexts to respond to issues and demands, also in innovative/creative way. (2) On the other, the Design challenge becomes the task to encourage a multidimensional discourse (Klamer, 2016) with a wide audience, overcoming the high specialisation of the topics portrayed and expanding the visitor's vision into the future. Thanks to the use of technologies and multimedia set-up, all the exhibited projects result in an alternation of suggestive installations able both to fascinate the visitor at first glance and respect the research sophistication. Visitors are brought closer to global issues, thanks to their emotional involvement during the journey.