Bruno Munari's Project Methodology, a graphical revisitation

Tuesday, April 17 2007

Project Methodology by Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari (October 24, 1907 – September 30, 1998) was an Italian desginer, who contributed fundamentals in many fields of visual arts (paint, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non visual arts (literature, poetry, didactic) with the research on the game subject, infancy and creativity.

In his book Da cosa nasce cosa (I don't know if there's an english version of this book), Munari writes about project methodology. In his words, project methodology is a needed series of operations, ordered in a logical path as given by experience. It's aim is to reach the best result with the minimum effort.

In presenting this, Munari uses a graphical approach, where the different steps of the project methodology are indicated by a series of abbreviation. Those abbreviatons represent each and every step of his proposed approach to the project methodology itself:

Problem
Problem's Definition
Problem's Components
Data Gathering
Data Analysis
Creativity
Technology
Experiment
Prototype
Verification
Blueprint
Production

Skipping an explanation of the above process, it would take to much here, still I guess anybody's with a project management background has a clue of what's this is all about. There's plenty of Munari's publications available in english (see this Amazon link), they all are worth a reading.

A graphical revisitation of the project methodology

What I did is to graphically restyle the Munari's project methodology. The following image is what I came up with. Please consider I made this in a vertical format to keep this blog layout intact. A eps file is available in it's intended horizontal format to download and use in your projects.