Enzo Mari’s Barcelona Manifesto
Enzo Mari’s Barcelona Manifesto from 1999 should still be followed by designers; now more than ever!
“Barcelona Manifesto
The utopizing tension of the origins of design must be recovered. If this is the allegory of a possible transformation, then it should reach as many people as possible. Those people who build our environment in a state of alienation and thus remain partially responsible of its transformation.
The mechanisms lead by the IT revolution are presently devouring all ideas to vomit sellable goods.
To begin with, in the next decades we must find the right ways to isolate from this redundancy the transformation ideas. In order to achieve that we must separate them from all those ideas that are generated by irresponsible anarchies that deny and trivialize the drive towards the utopia, thus making it impossible to get people involved.
In the meanwhile, it might be worth to generalize the idea that: every project works towards ethics (which can be compared to the Hippocratic Oath.)”