Having set these scholastic oppositions aside, the ‘substance’ of contemporary design can present itself as a fluid blend of technique and aesthetics, technology and phenomenology, conceived from the phase of ideation of a product also on the basis of its communicative potential. The present panorama thus seems to be inhabited by segments of language in a solid state, imagined, produced and distributed to suggest plot lines that thrive on narration and communication. The contemporary world has transformed into paradigm what had been a slow, difficult conquest for historical design, the idea that the object is not just a tool that can be of service, but also a true act of cultural production, extending its meaning beyond the physical dimension and into a wider, deeper one made up of its essence as a story, poetry and suggestion, in a state of resonance with the society it embodies.

The semantic core of that system of meaning that is design, i.e. the product seen as a material artifact, is amplified and reverberates in the extended body of communication. The internal variety displayed by contemporary creativity is in fact the source and matrix of its communicative potential, which finds its maximum assertion not so much (or no longer) in the identification of a definitive solution, but in the spurting dispersion into a flow of guesses and explorations, open and proteiform. In other words, contemporary design is a ‘plural’ phenomenon, not because there are many players, but because its own expressive phenomenology requires it to split into multiplicity, into blurriness, into the transubstantiation of the aesthetic body of the product into narrative and communication.