MANZINI
ENZIO
Ezio Manzini’s work centers on design for social innovation as a driving force for a just and ecological transition. From this perspective, he founded DESIS: an international network of design schools engaged in these issues.
He currently serves as President of the DESIS Network and is Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. Over the past decade, he has held visiting professorships at several international institutions, including Elisava (Barcelona), Tongji University (Shanghai), Jiangnan University (Wuxi), University of the Arts London, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (Cape Town), and Parsons School of Design (New York City).
His recent publications include: “Design, When Everybody Designs. An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation” (MIT Press, 2015); Politiche del quotidiano (Edizioni di Comunità, 2018) and its English edition Politics of the Everyday (Bloomsbury, 2019); Abitare la prossimità (Egea, 2021) and its English edition Livable Proximity (Egea, 2022); Plug-ins: Design for City Making in Barcelona with Albert Fuster and Roger Paez (Elisava and Actar Publishers, 2023); and Fare Assieme, Una nuova generazione di servizi pubblici collaborativi with Michele D'Alena (Egea, 2024).
In 2024, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Design Research Society.
Sailing against the wind
KEYNOTE
The talk introduces material counter-poetics as a critical framework for design practice. It centres materiality as a site that bears both the afterlives of extractive capitalism and the conditions that can support collective flourishing.
Through a series of projects that sit with and within damaged ecologies, To Re-enchant Contested Grounds explores practices that engage with the toxic, the residual, and the submerged not just as conditions to be analysed, but as grounds from which to collectively mobilise and rehearse other worldings.
By fostering fabulations rooted in situated material knowledges, design’s role is rethought as an act of re-enchantment—a fiction committed to imagining and sustaining possible futures and enabling practices that support intersectional, intergenerational justice from within the realities of the now.