“Buona matita social club” (“buona matita” translates as “good pencil”) is one of the few headlines that caught my attention on a magazine that I was lazily browsing last week while coming back from Isola d’Elba on the ferry (yep, vacatiors are over). The article, signed by MOMA architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli (let me note that she is an Italian), is about the emergence of social design and the idea that there are *not* only “pretty chairs and limited edition lamps” to care about in the field; UK designer Hilary Cottam’s work is reported as an example. Of course this might sound obvious to many specialists but I think it is still very new for the general public.

It could appear ironic, or notable at least, that the story appeared on a magazine entitled “Style” and that it is all about lifestyle and fashion in the most conventional meaning of expensive and sophisticated products, or, well, this is what its several advertisers sell (the magazine is packaged on Friday with the big Italian daily Corriere della Sera and it is mainly addressed to an adult, male and affluent readership; you pay an extra 50 eurocents for it).

Perhaps this is one of the many small signs of the increasing awareness of the themes so much discussed at Changing the Change in Torino, where I did have the impression of a very important but still quite relatively young and specialistic environment (despite the fact that some of the key principle and perspectives have already a quite long history in the design thinking tradition – Paola Antonelli quotes e.g. Papanek and his “Design for the real world”, published back in 1971.  Update 9th of November 2013: see below the memorable 1973 cover, taken from a 2012 Domusweb article, again from Paola Antonelli )