Reforming Future

For the layout design of Reforming Future AMDL CIRCLE has created symbolic flags that evoke the climate of youth protest, like the sheets that wave during demonstrations and student marches with the grand slogans that invoke the need to act “to reform the future”. Hung in the garden of the Istituto Marchiondi Spagliardi, a Brutalist building by Vittoriano Viganò that today lies disused on the outskirts of Milan, these pieces of cloth create a scenario to accompany the story of the works on display: installations, models and videos that tackle the anthropological themes proposed by architects Branzi and De Lucchi over the course of ten years of laboratories (2007-2017) that have explored concepts such as Penumbra, Ruins, Poverty, Chaos, Death, Eros, Rebellion, Diversity, Contamination and Liberty.
To express the message of the exhibition with visual immediacy, the choice was made to create a comic-book fantasy world. On the pieces of cloth, forms like clouds in movement and explosions sum up graphically the ideas of reform of design and the importance of their social implications; the words of Christoph Böninger, President of IF Design Foundation Munich, reinforce the concept: the designer has a responsibility in the construction of the world to come and must enter the field to tackle the major climate challenge. “What value does design have if there is no profit?” “There must be an extended ethics in design, starting with design education” “Design education needs to revisit the public value of design”, these are just some of the phrases chosen that shout out the need for a new way of training planners, making them increasingly aware that when you design an object, you also design the behaviours of those who will use that object.