The theme that inspires DESIGNA’s 4th edition focuses on the bond between Design and Desire.

The subject of Desire emerges explicitly in the public policies devoted to the arts and to the industry following the need to react to the competition of foreign products, more appealing to consumers. The diversi ed o er of distinct products to a same function adds the need to outstand and persuade to the object’s intrinsic quality in order to make it comply with parameters such as identi cation and belonging, buying power, social status, gender and symbolic expectations.

The subjection to Desire is an inexorable trend of capitalist societies’ dynamics, since this type of categories frame the equation of contemporary freedom of choice and individualexpression. ThroughDesire,Designbondswithcommunicationand mediation, in a sort of metaphysics of the concrete in which the capacity to create, promote, consume and use goods and services tend to recon gure the aesthetical experience. The appeal to the imagination, or even pleasure, runs through Design’s every domains. Paradoxically, such appeal aims for a position of loyalty and linkage to which not even the electronic platforms or the new media can escape.

Desire and imagination work as elaborate predication processes that reveal the individual’s cultural substrate through an uncountable number of narratives and ctions, sources of education and production of knowledge.

Such cosmogony, connected with a certain epicureanism of contemporary life,
may be able to question the humanities, as well as Design’s more technological dimensions, bringing together crossed perspectives on Design’s theory and practice, as well as on civic morals and body policies.

It is precisely to understand the relevance and the ways in which Desire projects, programs and constitutes itself (with)in Design that DESIGNA invites to the submission of communication proposals.