CD-Lab/NABA-26 Design History 2 English Italiano

Workshop on Play Design. 16/04/2026

Link to course website here.

PETER T. LANG, PhD., INSTRUCTOR

By the mid-sixties Italian designers and architects had rejected the basic tenets driving the modern design profession.  Their efforts, which coalesced into what would be known as the Radical Design movement, undermined traditional types of commercial practice while embracing more revolutionary forms of lifestyle. Their designs and actions spread throughout the larger design community, producing in the process radicalized solutions for the domestic environment and public spaces while gaining international notoriety through magazines and museum collections.

One of the movement’s contemporaries, the art and architectural critic and curator Lara Vinca Masini, wrote that the success of the Italian Radical Design movement could be attributed to their openness to “contamination,” as they intentionally disregarded the boundaries between the arts, design and architecture.

“Play is older than culture, for culture… always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.”

«Il gioco è più antico della cultura, poiché la cultura… presuppone sempre l’esistenza di una società umana, mentre gli animali non hanno aspettato che fosse l’uomo a insegnare loro a giocare.»

JOHAN HUIZINGA (1872 –1945) wrote: Homo Ludens (1938) where he observed that play is the primary “formative element in human culture.”