Design 4.0. Practices and processes of diffuse and circular design for the enhancement and development of local cultural heritage.

Abstract

The production of cultural heritage has for a long time found a privileged position within manufacturing and inside the factory (of goods and construction), where innovations were developed and quickly translated into production actions. Alongside his fragmentation, today we learn the horizontal distribution of design centers, due to the strengthening of communication networks and enabled by new value emergencies, which no longer belong only to production sites but are closer to the world of consumption. If the contribution of ICT on one hand has influenced the organization of production, new technologies, such as information highways and big data analytics, also generate an impact on the design processes, up to generate new project practices (i.e. co-design), increasingly open to the contribution of an "unskilled" audience of users and amateurs. Thus the design matter is transferred from the factory to the market or, better said, in the society where every product builts his meaning and value matrix. In this context surrounding factors become relevant, and they are precisely expressed by the local user, through the connotation of the cultural heritage of a tribe, a buying group, or a local community, which builds a cluster of relationships, through the lattice aggregation of people around a common fire. The research try to highlight how local enhancement processes can be useful in the contemporary project and analyzes how co-design practices contribute to generate innovation in the everywhere cultural heritage.