Local Design and Development: A space for coordination between design, craft and territory

Abstract

The creation of the Centro Metropolitano de Diseño (Design Metropolitan Center) was the resolution emerging from a strategy and a methodological search which allowed to contact the design and its main actors with the new context phenomena which appeared by the end of the 90s in Argentina, such as the social crisis, unemployment, the devaluation and subsequent revaluation of national production, the industry collapse and recovery, the exponential growth in the number of design professionals, the emergence of new entrepreneurs, etcetera. Several experiences, programs and activities have been developed during the 10 years of this institution and, perhaps, the greatest contribution has been to clearly propose an agenda linking design activities to local development strategies in the City of Buenos Aires, through a systemic model which covered each of its initiatives. Hence, recurrent and many times irreductible conflicts concerning apparently antagonistic positions, which are usually frequent in academic and professional debates of the Latin American design world, were channeled from practices exceeding reductionisms and diving into the complexity brought by the work with multiple actors who are part of aproject settled in the territory. This work explores, based on one of the projects carried out by the CMD and other particular experiences still in progress, the outstanding aspects observed in a process of mutual transfer between craftsmen and designers located in different territories: one being an urban and compact territory, and the other being the vast puna of the Argentine Northwest. Likewise, it intends to mention the multiplicity of actors and factors operating in the design-craft relation as part of a local development system, which contains and conditions it. Finally, some methodological recommendations are proposed to advance in the design of programs which allow to articulate these two universes.

Key words: design, craft, local development, territory, research.