Elio Romanazzi

He was born in Puglia, Italy, in 1998. After graduating from scientific high school, he moved to Milan where he obtained a three-year degree in Industrial Product Design at Politecnico di Milano in 2020, continuing his studies at the same university with the Integrated Product Design master’s degree course.

He associates his academic studies with collaboration with Milanese design studios active in the field of collectible design. He is interested in design as a means of investigation and storytelling, aimed at exploring new material and formal possibilities as well as changes in social and environmental systems associated with the world of production, marketing and consumption of products.

Abstract
The thesis aims to explore the opportunities that the Growing Design approach could have in generating production systems with a positive environmental impact, by actively participating in a specific Growing Design process based on the use of Bacterial Cellulose. At the same time the exploration intends to shed light on new ways of interpreting, sourcing, transforming, and coexisting with natural resources and living organisms.

Global ecosystems are sliding inexorably towards the greatest ecological collapse since the beginning of the last geological era, dragged in this direction by the uncontrolled development triggered by the unstoppable capitalist expansion attempt. In this scenario, a general loss of faith by an increasing number of designers in traditional production and commercialisation systems appears to give rise to a real ‘material revolution’. The phenomenon involves the emergence of bottom-up design initiatives aimed at proposing innovative ways of sourcing, processing and distributing resources in the effort to trigger social and environmental regeneration. From the analysis of the described scenario, Growing Design stands out as one of the most promising possibilities. This area of design, in fact, envisions the establishment of a co-creative relationship between designer and living organisms for the production of materials and artefacts. Hence the establishment of manufacturing where design finds centrality at every stage processes and based on the use of more than renewable resources.

Therefore, the exploration moves towards the evaluation of the opportunities and criticalities of the particular GD process by experimenting with a project based on the application of Bacterial Cellulose in product design, specifically an artificial lighting system. Therefore, the exploration moves towards the evaluation of the opportunities and criticalities of the particular GD process. Such evaluation falls, thus, into the interpretation and re-elaboration of some of the topics usually associated with the Growing Design process, hence to the representation of the re-elaborated topics through the designed and prototyped artefacts, as well as the related design-production system conceived.