Utensilia© to design. On the “process by which people go about producing things”

Utensilia© reinterprets Sennet’s The Craftsman, to define a methodology of territorial mapping “ better undertending of the process by which people go about producing things” (2008, p.16) in order to develop the potential existing in the manufacturing contexts of southern Italy.1 Sennet uses a title apparently allusive to pre-industrial conditions of pro- duction, turns it into a critique of the unlimited productivity of a technique and technology that have exchanged aims for means, generating a “culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm” on human artifacts that continually risks self-destruction” (p.12) On the background of the meaninglessness of the tragedy of the Second World War, he re-discusses the distinction posed by Hannah Arendt, in Vita Activa (1958, transl. it. 2003) between Homo faber, judge of labor and material practices, and Animal laborans, for whom it matters only that a thing works in itself. Questioning that distinction offers us unprecedented keys to inter- preting the relationship between thought and production.