The essence of industrial design is the planning of goods and services aimed at improving man’s activities. Design materializes in the logic of mass production of these artefacts. The designer takes part in the decisions supporting production choices, that is technology, resources and product functionality.

Sustainability in industrial design has been interpreted in different ways. The choice of eco-friendly resources, the introduction of the concept of product life cycle and the eco-effective system innovation are the most implemented principles. Industrial design research has only recently started the debate about a possible role of the profession with respect to social equity.

Even if eco-effective approach is used in advanced industrial societies, it proves not to be suitable for developing countries, as it increases the existing social imbalances. These countries are characterized by the symbiosis of areas with different levels of development. These symbiotic areas, firstly represented by urban and rural outskirts, suffer heavier social pressure because of the problems related to the lack of public utilities.

The research objective is to propose metadesigning instruments based on a critical theory of sustainable development, in order to steer industrial design operations aimed at promoting  local autonomy, life quality improvement and political participation in the outlying communities in the south of the world.

The word metadesign indicates the interdisciplinary designing activity whose purpose is to manage the data collecting and analysis process and to steer the project formalisation. This activity expresses, therefore, the meaning of theoretical reflection that leads to the designing stage, preparing its development process even before the idea is shaped into an object.

The investigation has been defined as a qualitative theoretical-bibliographical research, with a case study for the problem analysis, hypothesis testing and experimentation of the proposed instruments. The case study refers to two outlying communities in the south of Brazil.

The paper shows some metadesigning indications which are the first instruments arisen from the author’s ongoing Ph.D research in Design Sciences, at the University IUAV in Venice. The instruments presented are the result of the analysis of the problems that emerged from the case study.

Such problems refer to the lack of treated water, to pollution and salinization of available sources, to health problems due to the consumption of infected water, to the lack of sewage systems and to social marginalization of these communities deriving from their poverty and exclusion from local political life.

These instruments promote the designing intervention by proposing activities to carry out in order to make the product or service reach the desired social-environmental aims. They refer to the governance and the empowerment, to the local autonomy and environmental sustainability of these communities.

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