Local, diffuse and bottom-up. A new design policy for Italy?

Italy is an anomaly as it is the only economically developed country without a national system of structures and infrastructures specifically dedicated to the generation of the design policy. The governance model of Italian design does not seem to have a recognized and institutional leadership at national level but it presents a rich set of resources at local level in terms of cultural, productive, scientific and professional capabilities and know how. The development of a National design Policy looks thus to have a local dimension; in this context the main opportunities of connection among regional design communities are generated by a bottom-up approach that give life to spontaneous and temporary models of interaction. Italy follows this path in order to promote national design driven innovation and to generate cultural initiatives or research programmes in this sector. On one hand this polycentric model shows as strength elements dynamism and flexibility of its policy initiatives, but on the other it suffers from a series of problems related to the dispersion of resources and to the difficulty in identifying an appropriate scale of intervention for the development and effectiveness of the programs and policy initiatives. The various local institutions - often not interconnected– cannot guarantee continuity and a systematic approach to the pilot projects they develop, and in this way they cannot consolidate their outputs and turn them into policy that can be replicated in other regions or at a National level. Problems of discontinuity and assistentialist management policy in many initiatives provoke then a further dispersion of resources resulting in negative consequences both for innovation development and the reformulation of the policy themselves. In this scenario, as shown by case studies, Italy should not be considered a such a negative Development model for what concerns Design and a National Policy, but it possibly represent an alternative to the British or Scandinavian models. Differently from these countries, where the approach is a to top-down one, in Italy there is a multiplicity of micro policy autonomously generated from the bottom, and in order to spread as a reference model at the national (and international) level they need new connection tools and new design tools that allow local actors to operate more effectively in this field.