The conference is deliberately titled after the exhibition curated by CSAC that took place at the Abbey of Paradigna. CSAC, through its immense archives, carries out an ongoing reflection on the role of archives in modernity and contemporaneity and, in the framework of the program of Parma Capital of Culture 2020+21, it created a path through the history of Italian design in the second half of the 20th century, while also opening some questions on contemporary perspectives. In this sense, the conference will retrieve some of the tenets of the exhibition and also further develop the first outcomes of the discussion initiated in that occasion a book that will be published in 2022. The main areas of interest of the exhibition were: “Memory and the Future” and “The Tools of Design and the Languages of Representation”.

Now, the conference, by drawing from the questions brought about by the exhibition aims at further investigating them and also bringing to the fore topics that weren’t openly addressed and that are yet at the center of the multidisciplinary debate on design. It will do so with both the analysis of concrete case studies and theoretical and methodological proposals aimed at highlighting the “multiverse” character of design. The tenets of the conference, i.e., objects, processes, experiences and narratives will hence also correspond to the sessions through which the event will be articulated.