Design Quality & Value. Ten years of design for society

How can we reconcile economic growth and the need to protect the environment with social justice and equality? In his long eclectic career as an architect, design historian, museum director and magazine editor, François Burkhardt has always encouraged the renewal of the formal and symbolic language of merchandising based on critical evaluation as well as promoting the ethical principles that must necessarily be behind any design. In this book, produces together with Giuseppe Furlanis and Angelo Menisci, he draws on his vast experience at ISIA-Florence to emphasise the central role of education and training in the development of a central role of education and training in the development of a critical conscience in design. Burkhardt considers design schools as possible "dams" against the now popular concept of design as the "handmaiden" of economic growth and production interested only in profit; a market that considers the steady, increasing consumption of goods and natural resources as its only source of growth. Burkhardt tackles the issue of training in design from a historical viewpoint: from William Richard Lethaby's Central School of Arts & Crafts to Water Gropius'Bauhaus, from Max Bill and Tomàs Maldonando's Hochschule für Gestaultung to the Italian ISIA.