The Histories of Design.

From the Nineties to the present: Italian firms and the international scene. With Marco Petroni

Curated by Domitilla Dardi
Guido Reni Hall – single ticket €5.00 – carnet five seminars €20.00 – free for myMAXXI cardholders and students of art and architecture eligible for educational credits.
Purchase of a ticket entitles the holder to reduced price museum entrance within a week of issue.

Five seminars introducing the protagonists, the ideas and the projects that have transformed Italian design in recent years

In this series of seminars the protagonists of diverse seasons of design or historians and experts in the subject explore the issues paying particular attention to the Italian situation within the broader international debate made up of collaborations and joint ventures, through diverse materials and types of design: from furnishing to car design, from technological products to food design, from graphics to brand identity.

It was on the 13th of March 1989 when the English physicist Tim Berners Lee presented at CERN a document entitled Information Management: a Proposal, a system for rapidly exchanging scientific data, using hypertexts (texts in which every single word can become a link to another text). Everything was available on computers linked to one another in a network.
In this the final seminar we shall be talking about the Internet and how it has radically changed our lives and the way in which we look at the design and production of our everyday existence. In the 1990s, the capillary diffusion of computers determined the development of new modes of communication, favouring the spread of ideas and information. Young designers found in Italy entrepreneurs capable of valorising their projects and the country is at the epicentre of global design.

Marco Petroni,, design theorist and critic. Lectures in the History of Contemporary Art at the Accademia Abadir in Catania; contract lecturer at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Naples; Curator at Large for the Fondazione Plart in Naples. Author of the essay Mondi possibili, appunti di teoria del design, Edizioni Temporale, Milan (2016); contributes to art, architecture and design periodical.

The Histories of Design Project has been produced thanks to the support of MINI, MAXXI Public Programs Partner