Low Cost Design Exhibition

Low Cost Design is a touring art exhibition with more than five hundred pieces and structures. These objects are related to the change in the use of manufactures or parts of the territory, through the aware actions of people, from all over the world. Pieces and structures, born to solve a specific task, are transformed into other problem solvers: the merit belongs to all of us, spontaneously creative artists. 

We are directed by technological and cultural tools, by intuitive faculty, by abstraction – capability, chance and error. The exposed examples explain the extraordinary adaptability to experiences and the innovative use of local resources. They are used to solve everyday needs, through the instinct, as a child, and the calculated planning, as an engineer. The exhibition Low Cost Design is a visual dictionary that shows a constant relation between “the poetic capacity” and “the technological capacity”. Works are created by people who don’t sleep long during night. They invent new objects or modify, in a natural way, the use of the already existing great amount. These new pieces escape the corporate planning rules, disclosing the interdisciplinary heritage that connects design culture to social disciplines, history, economy and politics. Everyday, other pieces are ready to be interpreted, recomposed and adapted to new human behaviors. They are created by a constant flow of spontaneous creativity, that applies logic and absolute selections.
Low Cost Design is an open project and is a constantly work-in-progress. The exhibited objects are collected in catalogs Low Cost Design, volumes I and II, where there are more than eight hundred color illustrations, edited in 2010 and 2011, both in Italian and in English. 

In Low Cost Volume I Daniele Pario Perra presents the results of a vast research project carried out between Northern Europe and the Southern Mediterranean, in the course of which he documented thousands of examples of spontaneous creativity, creating a visual dictionary that strikes a constant balance between "poetic skill" and "technological skill". The ideas presented are the creations of authors we don't know. They are classified according to different levels of research (five different design levels for objects, six categories for actions) and stimulate reflection on the recovery and re-use of materials. Above all, they present a very interesting picture from a sociological, urbanistic and ethnographic stand point. This is a book that involves us by taking a far-reaching, free-ranging, eclectic and radical look at our daily life.

Daniele Pario Perra continues, in the second volume, his original research project of the so-called “spontaneous design”, documenting the smart solutions created by anonymous designers to find a way to sort out everyday problems or needs. The book therefore presents hundreds of examples of unconventional creativity: a re-use, or better, a modified and enlightened use not only of objects, but also of actions and projects that can change the use of the territory, thus revealing people’s innovative customs and great imagination.

Images are introduced by a text by Daniele Pario Perra and by a series of chapters written like a blog with a contribution of several authors on the themes ranging from objects history to design aesthetics, from creativity to handicraft, from urban tribes to territory culture and planning, thus presenting not only some important aspects on the subject, but also a very interesting overview from the contemporary social, urban and ethnographic point of view.

Thomas Alva Edison wrote, “If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” This simple statement recognizes a primary law of human creativity, namely the great potential hidden in each of us. Many of the inventions that have transformed our daily lives seem to be the outcome of purposeful research, passions or hobbies, but the long history of human creativity finds its ancestral motivation in the need to solve a problem. This general law is an instinctive force that invents, discovers, manipulates and recreates in every age and culture. Who knows what the first reaction of humanity was, 35,000 years before the birth of Christ, when it was first observed that attempts to start a fire had produced a regular hole? After some nervousness, it seems to have led to the invention of the bow drill. Over time the ability to associate individual inventions, hybridize them and create new uses has produced extraordinary insights. So in about 3500 B.C., the combination of the potter's wheel with a sledge produced the first revolution in human transportation, the wheeled cart. Some inventors have even become celebrities, real stars of antiquity. One of the best known, Archimedes of Syracuse, said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the whole world.”