Design e Artigianato in Sicilia. Scambio e contaminazione tra forme diverse della progettualità.

While travelling on the fast tracks of the digital world, our age has long understood the importance of promoting cultural heritage. In this context, the intangible heritage that is made up of the baggage of knowledge related to artisanal know-how represents the foundation of the determination of territorial identities. The School of Design of the University of Palermo was among the first to embrace the idea of using design as a tool to safeguard and evolve the skills of craftsmanship: in the words of Anna Maria Fundarò, founder in 1981 of the Industrial Design Institute of Palermo, the identity of Sicilian design is engraved in the DNA of a discipline whose meaning "is linked to our local dimension, to our "condition of architects and designers in Sicily" in the belief that there is an urgent need for the reconstruction of "our contemporary material culture, starting from the little things of everyday life and from "customs and behaviours". (Fundarò, A. M.,1980, 92-93). It is Anna Maria Fundarò who later promoted the series of conferences "Design for development" in which she puts the fruits of a process of research and formalization of the idea of a Sicilian design that springs from the union between the historical artisanal tradition and a design technical experimentation. A similar approach has also been adopted by many of the great masters of Italian design of the twentieth century, such as Ugo La Pietra, who applied it to the paradigms of Caltagirone’s ceramics. Today, we discover a design that wants to help "territories to exalt the differences, without cultivating nostalgia" (La Pietra U., 2020), defining hybrids professional profiles that increasingly shorten the distance between design and crafts, with excellent results that go to redefine the very concept of transitive design. Among others, we have the work carried out by Vittorio Venezia together with the artisans of via Calderai in Palermo, whose results led to OfficineCalderai, a project presented at the salonesatellite 2015; or the one carried out, the following year, with the artisans of Caltagirone and culminated in the project Rocca dei Vasi. This article offers a review of a history of the exchange and contamination between design and craft, mapping key actors and moments, methodologies and results, looking at recent history but with an eye projected to a lesson in sustainability for the future.