Local tradition and global future: New paradigms of the Made in Italy cultural design

This paper proposal, which is part of a wider interdisciplinary research called MICS (Circular and Sustainable Made in Italy), intends to reflect on the new contours of the contemporary idea of ‘Made in Italy’, exploring its cultural value chain and the user engagement’s new paradigms as well as the companies’ current narrative strategies and the role played by the product-service systems within the Italian production framework. The paper will focus on the new and consumer-driven business models for resilient and circular supply chains analyzing how Italian design supply companies today address the public (visitors, buyers, customers, users, etc.) in the framework of an approach in which the ethical components prevail over the aesthetic ones. Furthermore, the research will study the narrative forms, both physical and virtual, through which companies present, to an increasingly sensitive and attentive audience to environmental issues, not their products but their strategies related to sustainability, inclusion, respect for the environment, and control of their products’ life cycle, as well as how they pursue the objectives of product, process and social innovation.