Design in Italy: it employs more than 60 thousand people and Milan is confirmed as the capital of Italian design

Fondazione Symbola, Deloitte Private, POLI.design, ADI Associazione per il Disegno Industriale in collaboration with Comieco, AlmaLaurea, CUID, under the patronage of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy presented today at theADI Design Museum in Milan the results of the Design Economy 2024 report, with the aim of raising awareness of the value of design for the competitiveness of the national production system. The presentation was attended by Ermete Realacci, president of the Symbola Foundation; Ernesto Lanzillo, Deloitte Private Leader Italia; Luciano Galimberti, ADI president; Cabirio Cautela, CEO POLI.design; Domenico Sturabotti, director of the Symbola Foundation; Antonio Grillo, design director Tangity Design Studio - NTT Data; Maria Porro, president Salone del Mobile; Marco Maria Pedrazzo, designer manager; Susanna Sancassani, managing director METID - Politecnico di Milano; Francesco Zurlo, dean of the School of Design Politecnico di Milano; Lorenzo Bono, Comieco research and development manager; Adolfo Urso, minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy.

The Economy of Design: a snapshot in Italy and Europe.

The sector has 41,908 thousand operators in the design sector, divided between 24,596 freelancers and self-employed workers and 17,312 enterprises, which generated an added value of 3.14 billion with 63,485 thousand employees. The enterprises are distributed throughout the country, with a particular concentration in the Made in Italy areas of specialization and in the regions of Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna and Piedmont, where 60 percent of the enterprises are located. It is in relation to business turnover that Italy has the best performance among EU countries, ahead of the results achieved by France, Spain and Poland.

The main capital of Italian design is Milan: the Lombard capital is able to concentrate 18 percent of the sector’s added value on the national territory. Milan is also home to the Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone, the world’s largest event dedicated to design. The regional distribution of the data highlights the strong concentration of design activity in Lombardy and specifically the province of Milan. In fact, the Lombard territory gathers 29.4 percent of Italian companies, 32.7 percent of added value and 27.7 percent of total employment. Three other northern regions are confirmed to follow: Veneto (second by share of firms 11.4%, third by value added, 11.4% and third by employment, 11.7%), Emilia Romagna (third by share of firms, 10.5%, but second by value added, 13.5% and employment, 13.3%) and Piedmont (fourth by share of firms, 8.3%, fourth by value added, 10.9% and fourth by employment, 11.0%).

The province of Rome (6.6 percent), third in terms of product (5.4 percent) and employment (5.9 percent), emerges second in the ranking by number of firms, followed by Turin (5.0 percent but second by value added, 7.2 percent and employment, 7.1 percent), Florence (fourth by share of firms, 3.1 percent, fifth by value added, 2.9 percent and seventh by employment, 2.6 percent), and Bologna (fifth by share of firms, 2.8 percent, fourth by value added, 3.7 percent and employment, 3.6 percent).

Design and green transition: sustainability driving growth

The theme of environmental sustainability has a certain relevance for the sector: the widespread level of competence shows medium-high values for almost all operators surveyed (88.0%, up from 86.9% in the previous report), with a peak of 96.4% for companies with more than 10 employees. Confirming the prominence of the topic, as many as 74.8 percent of those surveyed emphasize its importance in current projects.

Design for packaging and temporary fittings

Considering all the companies and designers interviewed, about a third are currently engaged in activities related to packaging design, a value that rises to 50 percent if we consider designers alone. Looking at the materials of reference, paper or paper-dominant materials (53.2% of cases) is the main choice today, and it remains so for realizations in the near future, although with a decreasing trend. This is followed by packaging design carried out using plastic or plastic-dominated materials (12.8 percent). Even with reference to transitional materials (temporary set-ups, signage, etc.), it is paper and paper-predominant materials that are used the most (23.4 percent).

Prominent among the growing uses are bio-based materials (a family of predominantly polymeric materials or products that are derived from plant biomass) with a more than doubled share in projected use over the next three years, rising from 9.2 percent to 19.9 percent. In choosing paper and paperboard as sustainable design materials, the importance of certifying them as coming from sustainably managed forests (FSC, PEFC, etc.) is particularly emphasized by design practitioners, which is stressed by nearly half of the respondents (47.0%).

New emerging figures in design

New in this edition is an in-depth study that aims to identify emerging figures related to design in Italy. The study led to the identification of twenty new emerging professional figures that highlight how the field of design is intertwined with innovation, organization and technologies.

Italy is following a global trend of designers moving into fields other than traditional design, demonstrating that the skills of the design world are versatile and applicable to a wide range of new and emerging fields. In parallel, traditional design figures related to industrial design, architecture, furniture, and fashion are also undergoing transformation by hybridizing traditional design-related skills with those of marketing, business organization and strategy, and advanced technologies.

Among the emerging design figures are transdisciplinary professions such as material designer, accessibility and inclusion designer, and design engineer. Conversely, businesses are more familiar with more vertical and specific figures such as the digital content strategiste the information designer. Both designers and enterprises agree on the relevance of the emerging figure of the prompt designer/designer for AI, who can create a bridge between technology and the practical needs of customers.

Italian Education in Design.

In the academic year 2022/2023, 95 institutions have activated courses of study in design disciplines, 3 more than the previous survey. Among them are 30 universities (of which 20 public and 10 private) 26 other Institutes authorized to grant AFAM degrees, 20 Academies of Fine Arts, 13 Legally Recognized Academies and 6 ISIAs, for a total of 344 courses of study, distributed in various levels of training and different areas of specialization. Compared to the previous year, the number of accredited and activated courses grows by 5 percent and the number of institutes by 3 percent, particularly in the case of Universities and the Academies of Fine Arts and Legally Recognized. Growing are not only the number of institutes and courses activated but also the demand and the number of students amounting to 16,423, or 8.6 percent more than the previous academic year.

Design, Digital Transition, Artificial Intelligence.

Among the technologies considered most relevant by the sector is Extended Reality (40.6 percent), which, with its immersive tools, enables new forms of collaboration, encouraging creativity, enhancing education and opening up new business opportunities. It is followed by predictive and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) (37.7 percent), for its ability to support and make design activities more efficient, automating some of its phases, generating ideas and concepts, simulations and advanced prototypes.

While today the level of technological competence of designers appears high - overall 83 percent of respondents in the report rate it as medium or high - preparation on AI-based technologies overall is still limited, in line with the national context: only 45 percent rate their level of knowledge as medium-high. The limited understanding of how AI works and the opportunities arising from its introduction currently translates into reduced use in design: only a little more than 3 out of 10 respondents use it routinely. Among the barriers to the widespread use of generative AI we have language barriers-software tends to provide more accurate results when queried in the programming language-and demographic barriers-the average age of designers is often inversely proportional to computer skills.

The benefits of using AI are optimization of project development time (42.0%), greater customization of products, and better services and user experience (37.7%). A value related to the complementarity and synergy between the two intelligences: human and artificial.

Statements

“The Italian leadership in design confirms its important role as the intangible infrastructure of Made in Italy and a protagonist in the sustainability challenge. In the midst of a green and digital transition,” says Ermete Realacci, president of the Symbola Foundation, “design is called once again to give shape, meaning and beauty to the future. Many aspects of our lives, as well as many sectors, are changing: from the metamorphosis of mobility towards shared, interconnected and electric models, to the processes of decarbonization and circular economy that are changing industry and supply chain relations. Products, in a context of scarce resources, will necessarily have to be redesigned to become more durable, repairable, and reusable. The relationship between design and sustainability is at the heart of the new European Bauhaus launched by President Von der Leyen to contribute to the realization of the European Green Deal, and for this reason, too, Italy is a natural protagonist. Because, as written in the Assisi Manifesto, courageously addressing the climate crisis is not only necessary but represents a great opportunity to make our economy and our society more human-scale and therefore more capable of the future.”

“Italy represents the beating heart of European design boasting supremacy among the 27 EU countries in terms of employees and turnover in the sector. What distinguishes our country, in addition to its dimensional primacy, is also the level of innovation of Design Made in Italy, which is now considered a key element for competitiveness,” comments Ernesto Lanzillo, Partner and Leader of Deloitte Private in Italy. “To maintain the competitive advantage held so far, Design Made in Italy companies and designers will also have to invest in Artificial Intelligence, a technology with extraordinary potential that is already being experimented by the most cutting-edge companies in the sector and for which designers’ skills will become increasingly important to maintain a human-centered approach.”

“We have been accustomed for years to interpreting the role,” says Cabirio Cautela, CEO Poli.design, “and the activity of a designer in a primarily manufacturing key. In a profoundly changing scenario we are instead observing the emergence of designer figures who operate as digital content creators, designers who manipulate organizational aspects once the prerogative only of human resources or designers linked to new fields such as biology - the bio-designer - or law, such as the legal designer. As POLI.design, we always seek a balance between training opportunities related to traditional industries and initiatives that anticipate training tomorrow’s professionals, who are already ready to enter competitive contexts working on the frontier of innovation and experimentation.”

“Timely knowledge and qualitative reading of data on Italian design,” says Luciano Galimberti, ADI president, “about its economic consistency, the companies that practice it and the training of its professionals are a fundamental prerequisite for any reliable interpretation of the phenomena that characterize it year after year. For this reason, ADI, which of Italian design is a direct observatory, participates with commitment in the work of qualitative assessment from which Design Economy was born, an effective tool to achieve the central objective of the association: the dissemination of the culture of design in the world of production and social life.”

Design in Italy: it employs more than 60 thousand people and Milan is confirmed as the capital of Italian design

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