ANCIENT CONTEMPORARY
Can Design and Communication provide a perspective view in order to tie the plot of relations underlying the production culture of our territory?
Starting from this research question, the “Final Synthesis Lab of the Three-year Course in Industrial Product Design” of the University of Bologna, in cooperation with the Barilla Historical Archive, the Food Museums of the Province of Parma, the Carpigiani Ice-cream Museum, the Italian Museum of Cast Iron, the Historic Museum “G. Bucci” of Cooperativa Ceramica in Imola, has tried new ways of development and fruition of material and immaterial heritage preserved by the involved realities.
Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
Graduate Course in Industrial Product Design
Final Synthesis Lab (A-K)
Ancient – Contemporary
Design and Communication for heritage enhancement of the regional territory of Emilia Romagna
Teachers: Flaviano Celaschi, Claudia Collina, Elena Formia, Viktor Malakuczi, Valentina Manchia
Tutor: Laura Succini
The Course, led by a team of five teachers for about fifty students, aims to develop product-systems that, by means of design and digital technologies, are able to storytell and enhance the production culture of the territory and to boost new relations among users, museums and territory.
The projects for the Barilla Historical Archive
The size and the importance of the production culture of Emilia Romagna are difficult to assess, but impossible to deny. Everything around us speaks about a history that has its origins in the long manufacturing and food-agricultural tradition of the territory. Many businesses have known how to enhance such tradition, establishing collections and museums that tell their know-how, play out processes, products and communication artefacts, cultivate the virtuous relation among past, present and future.
With the cooperation of the Barilla Historical Archive, between September 2019 and January 2020 a project was developed aimed at opening the Archive to a wide audience through the engineering of an artefact of the memory linked to it, in order to draw visitors and allow the spreading of knowledge of this reality together with the values of the tradition and of the territory in which it’s born.
The project includes three time phases inserted before, during and after the visit.
PROJECT 1 – Five Eggs, Five Tools – Auriti, Chiesa, Forastiero
The concept aims to enhance the idea of tool. The inspiring source is the poster “Five Eggs per kilo” by Erberto Carboni of 1953. The starting step of the project involves a promotional action through the packaging of semolina pasta in order to invite the user to download an app or visit the website.
By means of them, it’s possible to choose a tool that, inside the Historical Archive, will lead the user in the thematic insights. During the visit, the user can interact with a digital activity that, simulating the process of preparation/manufacturing of fresh pasta with specific tools, will allow to access to thematic insights related to the archive. At the end of the visit the user could buy one or more tools, with a shape similar to those used during the activity, that will allow the processing of fresh pasta at home, too.
PROJECT 2 – Tailored Die – Bettoni, Fasulo and Govoni
The project includes the making of an object referred to the Barilla History, that can stimulate the audience to visit to the Historical Archive in view of its opening to the public. The basic idea is that the object could raise awareness in people of the existence of this museum structure. The object is a die that is delivered to the user only after finishing the visit: through a QR Code it’s possible to access to a graphic interface that allows to tailor the product by a semantic path made with the shown artefacts.