PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
Advertisement
Global Tools is the project with which, in the early 1970s, the protagonists of Italian Radical design tried to go one step further: having criticised design in the service of industry through exhibitions, drawings and provocative objects, they decided to found a school. Not an academy with teachers and diplomas, but a network of open workshops where people could learn again to use their hands, humble materials and spontaneous creativity.
The founding
Global Tools was founded on 12 January 1973 in Milan, in the editorial office of the magazine Casabella, then edited by Alessandro Mendini. Around the table sat almost every name of the Italian avant-garde: Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi and the rest of Archizoom, Superstudio, the Florentines of UFO and Gruppo 9999, Gaetano Pesce, Ugo La Pietra, the Neapolitan Riccardo Dalisi, Gianni Pettena, Remo Buti, Franco Raggi and others. Mendini, who gave the whole movement a voice through his magazine, was one of the most active founders.
An idea of a school
The aim was to promote the free use of simple, natural materials and techniques, in opposition to industrial production and to the specialised design taught at universities. Like the Arts and Crafts movement a century earlier, Global Tools looked to craft and manual work not out of nostalgia, but as a tool for freeing everyone's creativity, including that of people who were not designers. The programme included working groups devoted to the body, construction, communication, survival and theory: participants experimented with wood, earth, ropes and everyday gestures instead of designing products to sell.
Advertisement
The most concrete example of this spirit was Riccardo Dalisi's work in Naples: in the same years he carried out projects in the working-class district of Rione Traiano together with local residents and craftsmen, building objects from salvaged materials and putting design in the hands of those who would use it.
A short life
Global Tools organised seminars and meetings, but the groups' ideas were too different and the practical difficulties many. After a few seminars the project ran out of steam and, according to many of those involved, its end coincided with that of the radical movement itself: for Superstudio it marked the end of their design research, and the groups went their separate ways.
Legacy
The practical failure of Global Tools does not cancel its importance. The idea that design can arise from making, from play and from collaboration with its users returned in Studio Alchimia and then in Memphis, where Sottsass, Mendini and Branzi rediscovered craft and decoration. Today Global Tools is studied as one of the first examples of participatory design and as an early sign of the renewed interest in crafts and self-production.
Sources
Advertisement
