Mixing Tangible and Intangible Heritages: Design as a Nation Brand

Tangible and intangible heritages are the common contents of the Culture of a Nation. Nevertheless, both the economic literature and that one of the history of arts, they have increased and specified the categories of “works of art” for decades. Often hidden by the widespread well-known traditional “works” such as paintings and sculptures (the tangible) or festivals and oral traditions (the intangible), applied arts are now target of collecting and exhibiting. Most of all, design has been a manufacturers’ business for centuries and now it seems to have assumed the dignity of artists’ business. As a matter of fact, museums of design are now opening all over the world. Design is, first of all, the industrial supply chain of well-known Made In, when the original and creative Idea is matched to Applications. At a second step of the conceptualization, the creative content of design is qualified as an applied art. Particularly, “Design Museums” exhibit collections of famous designers, stylists and firms. The supply chain of famous brands could find a show in the Museum Rooms. Displaying the history of supply chains, Design and Industrial Museums are attracting new visitors, who appreciate applied arts and would like to experience a “creative visiting”. The Made in Italy has been a famous Nation Brand from the point of view of manufacturers of coffeepots, furniture, fashion and so on. Today, both manufacturers and exhibitors of the Made in Italy are nurturing the Brand as for both of its features, the manufacturing and cultural ones. The aim of the paper is the investigation of Italian Design as a creative “manufacturing and cultural industry”. Who is the exhibitor of this “Cultural Nation Brand”? In the first paragraph it will be introduced the concept of design, matching industrial locations and Museums of applied arts, industrial history and design. The second paragraph will focus on Italian Firms who have founded an Association joining all their Industrial Museums for the organization of events and the development of research and innovation. In the third paragraph there will be an analysis of the Triennale Foundation, the most famous Design Museum now in Italy, exactly in Milan. In the fourth paragraph, economic performances of a sample of USA Museums of Applied Arts and the Triennale Foundation will be compared with cluster analysis.