Fabrica - Communication of Social Issues

Fabrica by Benetton Group, Venice - Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The building which Fabrica runs out of.

On Wednesday we visited Fabrica which is seemingly located in the middle of nowhere but is actually in the heart of an industrial district and where the Benetton Group first began. The building itself was designed by Tadao Ando, the famous Japanese architect, and mixes the classic 17th century villas with a modern style made of concrete, aluminum and glass.

Catarina and Valentina, from Portugal and Italy respectively, are senior designers at Fabrica, and explained to us what Fabrica was all about and some projects they were involved in. Fabrica aims to bring together young designers from around the world to do creative research which is funded by grants from the Benetton group.

Some of the projects that I found were the most interesting were those that supported social projects. Since the Fabrica group does not have any requirements of creating a profit from their projects, it allows them freedom to work with NGO’s on social campaigns. Most of these campaigns consist of a series of posters against violence and prejudice for the United Nations. These posters all use strong visuals to clearly present the statistics related to the UNWHO’s reports. It’s fantastic that these enormous social problems can be communicated to the public by creative graphic designers without huge associated costs than no charitable organization can afford to spend.

Some examples of the projects that they’ve worked on include:


A Global Campaign launched by UNWHO for Violence Prevention following the release of the World Report on violence and health, in October, 2002 to raise awareness about the problem of violence through posters addressing different violence forms.


Child Injury campaign for UNWHO, by Valerie Gudenus (Fabrica) – 2011. More information about the campaign can be found at http://www.unicitaditalia.it/macro-la-pelanda.php


Road Safety is No Accident for UNWHO – 2007


Global Disability Campaign for UNWHO, commissioned by WHO and The World Bank. The campaign was presented with the launch of the World Report on Disabilities on June 9th at UN headquarters in New York. More information about the campaign can be found at http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/en/index.html

Note: All of Fabrica’s Visual Communication Projects can be found here

By Amanda Cox, Laura Van Staveren and Anne Charbonneau

Keywords: Society