Ettore Sottsass Jr., Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Riccardo Dalisi, Remo Buti, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Raggi, Davide Mosconi, Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, UFO Italia
1973 > 1975

“Global Tools was a decentralized experimental educational program that was proposed as an alternative to the institutional model of the university. […] The three notes for a didactic typology published in Casabella No. 379 detail the research, which, according to Superstudio, would call for “life as permanent global education” with particular reference to Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, a text in which the Austrian pedagog and philosopher states that the training of young people never happens in the school context but elsewhere, in times and places beyond the control of the school. Along the same lines, Andrea Branzi writes: “From the school as from the prison, nothing good will ever be obtained: all those who believe that one day a school can exist that will teach how to make a revolution do not understand this truth. The same can be said of the city that functionally formalizes society at the point of its social transformation, immediately presenting itself as an autonomous, non-transformable cultural and figurative legacy: history has taught us that the city can never be a revolutionary instrument if not through its own failure (barricades). […]

Global Tools was imagined as a school of arts and crafts and an anti-disciplinary attempt to establish a platform for the free exchange of different ideas and experiences: a place suited for the stimulation of individual creativity and the development of human potentialities. All within the more general perspective of continuing education, seen as “the only possible goal beyond the end of institutionalized education.” This initiative, intended to open up a period of experimentation with classes and students, was to have implemented a wide range of innovative processes in its functioning, from the viewpoint of both educational tools and also that of content. The educational tools would have to coincide with the direct experience of techniques and construction, the recording of original work processes, and with direct frequentation of the places where such experiences might take place. “A school of formation, not of information.” The fundamental idea of Global Tools would thus be that of giving rise to experimentation capable of constituting an advanced laboratory for industry (into which innovative professional contributions would be brought, as well as the input of culture), and an example of new kind of education without students and without teachers.”

/Excerpts from “Global Tools 1973-1975: Towards an Ecology of Design” by Silvia Franceschini e Valerio Borgonuovo, SALT, 2014/