Design and Communities: Exploring rural territories

Community Design is the result of a natural and healthy evolution in the broader sphere of design. While on the one hand design today still directs significant attention, care and resources to the design of objects, services and consumer products, sometimes useful and sustainable, sometimes neither useful nor ethical, on the other hand youngest designers invest in virtuous cultural, environmental and social processes of mediation, reconfiguration and interaction between communities and the territories they belong to, with a more humanistic than technocratic approach. A field in which the designer cooperates closely with local residents in multidisciplinary groups, enriched with new experts in the humanities such as philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers. Through some comparative case studies of projects run in Lebanon and Italy, the paper wants to discuss the importance for designers to use an experiential and anthropological approach for the development of new items, using the narrative tool to embrace the entire symbolic and rhetorical form of rural traditions in their projects. Man as part of the ecosystem, man understood as an organism within organisms, immersed in a continuous and swirling morphing that can shape our work in a reciprocal relational interaction with the things themselves.