The invention in everyday life

Michel de Certeau in the book “The Practice of Everyday Life” proposes the dimension of creativity as a widespread and multidirectional process, fueled by social dynamics and individual “tactics”, able to evade and transform the sense and the objectives of knowledge and institutional powers. The text sets out some elements of the complex thought of the French scholar, useful to enrich the debate, the language and the visions of contemporary design. In fact nowadays the notions of “invention” and “everyday life” are recurrent in the design discourse, especially with reference to the emergence of a society founded on the diffusion of network technologies, data accumulation, artificial intelligence. “Circumscribe the place” generated by this combination allows us to highlight the creative ability of people “in their social interaction” and the relevance of the socio-cultural and territorial contexts in which daily “inventions” are activated, generated by knowledge and practices that are not formalized. Moreover, the design culture has developed a broad reflection around the often exemplary quality of anonymous objects; it may be interesting to add the point of view of an author who has pointed out that even the anonymous consumer is actually also a designer and producer, capable of expressing invention and innovation in the use and interpretation of things. Today it is evident that the designer’s planning is changing in open and participatory design situations and in the creative processes activated by forms of collective and connective intelligence (Lévy, de Kerkhove, Mulgan, Manzini), especially in relation to some collaborative and systemic experiences developed around the themes of sustainability and able to produce “contextual value”, of which some illustrative readings are proposed.