Crafting the Future
The Italian Cultural Institute hosts a talk on how traditional craftsmanship and emerging technology converge to shape design's next chapter.
Why we picked this
Italy's design tradition has always negotiated between the handmade and the industrial — this talk extends that conversation to digital fabrication and computational design.
The Italian Cultural Institute presents a talk on the convergence of traditional craftsmanship and emerging technology in contemporary design. Italy’s design heritage — rooted in artisanal skill, material knowledge, and a particular attention to how objects feel in the hand — provides the starting point for a conversation about where that tradition goes when digital fabrication, AI-assisted design, and new materials enter the picture.
The discussion doesn’t treat technology as a threat to craft or craft as a nostalgic holdover. Instead, it examines how the two have always been entangled in Italian design history, from Renaissance workshops to postwar industrial production, and what the current technological moment means for that relationship.
Free and open to the public.