The Design Culture and the Challenges of the new Normal

The challenge of the new normal would be nothing particularly new for those designers that for years have advocated radical challenges to address major socio-technical crises in our society. Yet the urgency of the new normal would need society to take action very quickly, and this in turn, imply a well-structured design approach. The challenge for designers is therefore to operationalise principles that have been in the air for quite a long time, transforming them into practices, accelerating the exploration of mechanisms of transition and finding conceptual terms and operative strategies for working at different scales. This paper is exploring the implications of the idea of a new normal, in the view of taking a further step for the definition of a working site for the new normal.