Welcome!

Designing Economic Cultures is a research project that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question the project poses is:
how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?  Read more ›

Construction site for non-affirmative practice

Constructive Dismantling

My Castle Is Your Castle

RUN RUN RUN RUN – exhibition and lectures


Poster by Caterina Giuliani and Melissa Destino

Giovanna Zanghellini and Caterina Giuliani – two designers participating in the Construction site for non-affirmative practice – proposed RUN RUN RUN RUN, a one-week initiative that intended to analyse and question the phenomenon of contemporary socio-economic precarity. During this initiative we heard interventions by San Precario, the Carrotworkers’ Collective and Serpica Naro.

RUN RUN RUN RUN – lending its name to the initiative – is an exhibition curated by Melissa Destino on the state of precarity. The exhibition combines the perspectives of art and the design while confronting them with philosophical and psychological points of view in order to offer a multi-faceted scenario.


Works by Caterina Giuliani and Samuel Williams.


Work by Muge Yilmaz.

ABITO – is a project by Giovanna Zanghellini that narrates the conditions of precarity through objects.
How are objects and the concept of “home” changing while we live the liquid modernity? What mechanisms of adaptation could develop from this situation? Can the notion of precarity become tangible in relation to the conditions and perceptions of how we live?
ABITO takes its roots in a series of reflections on the phenomenon of precarity and its consequences on how we inhabit spaces. A series of garments are covering furniture and objects, adapting themselves to the changing contexts we live and recreating an atmosphere that makes us feel home.