Design: relationships, circularity, and science.

The book picks up a series of contributions born from an online column edited by the Design Laboratory for Sustainability of Dipartimento DIDA (UNIFI) during the period of the pandemic (March 2020, COVID-19): Marco Petroni, Formafantasma, Lorenzo Giorgi, Duccio Maria Gambi and Federica Fragapane. Designing Futuring – beyond the emergency scenario intends to reflect on the heavy contemporary global upheavals. The propagation of individualistic practices, the proliferation of ecological disasters, the lack of care for the Other and the Elsewhere, the growing social inequalities are all issues that strongly question the role (or rather the responsibility) of the designer. The need for a redirection of the future perspective (futuring), and therefore of the current paradigm, entails the rediscovery of design (ing) as an intellectual, creative and humanistic critical process present within our daily realities and underlines the importance of proposing more inclusive alternative projects and models that lead to the overcoming of the pandemic emergency state and the cocreation of plural societies. Through the collection of ideas, actions and case studies of particular interest, the book presents the explorations and contributions of heterogeneous profiles representing the different souls and fields of action of the discipline. Designers, researchers, historians, thinkers and activists called to share their thoughts have been involved in building a cartography of alternative landscapes and visions to recognize complexity by learning to navigate it, for a more sustainable future.