Nonconformist Jewels: Turn the Page Down

An ecological perspective has forever changed our way of thinking and doing Design. The jewellery industry relates to social problems, on the other hand to aggressive environmental impacts on the planet and this issue stems both from the extraction of raw materials and from the manufacture of the jewels themselves. In this emergency context and considering the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN Agenda 2030, first we must ask why can jewellery be so special for us even in critical moments, and second if these materials are so fundamental to project jewellery for everyday life? We look at the jewel as an object that says something about us, the way we read ourselves, also about the way we position ourselves in the world, as an action of empowerment in it, as an affirmation of our cultural vision or even of argument against a dominant socio-economic context. But it is also necessary to (re)think this field in the image of what is happening in product design for instance, searching for strategic answers, producing less and with better quality (not necessarily expensive materials), and even equating the involvement of the user in the process, in the assembly for instance or in the transformation of the product or its maintenance. This engagement improves the value of the jewel, an object of emotions that can also reflect a critical point of view and not necessarily confined to traditional techniques and designs. We present, in this article, exploratory and nonconformist exercises that were materialized in objects that talk about the state of the world and climate change, about social relations, about a paradoxical individualism and freedom, a consequence of the so-called “hypermodernity” paraphrasing Lipovetsky.