Design International

Starting with the knowledge related to Ergonomics in Design and design for inclusion, this book aims to provide an opened and integrated point of view to the disciplines of cognitive psychology, pedagogy and human-computer interaction. It configures as a flexible tool for understanding key aspects concerning the use of technologies and their effects, with special regards to the experiential dimension on a human scale, particularly tailored to weaker people.

The issue of empathy as an embodied, dialogic experience that potentially enhances the value of human relationships, constitutes the core of this book, which is mainly addressed to explore whether empathy is designable and how. This book traces a theoretical framework for changing perspective on empathy in design, by integrating a phenomenological account. One that focuses on empathy's specific nature of intersubjective experience that introduces the other into one’s own personal horizon.

The book explores the relationship between time and the design of spaces. The temporal dimension of spaces is a horizon that has yet to be strongly explored. In the future it is increasingly likely that it will be the forms of time, rather than those of space, that will undergo the most interesting transformations. The essays explore time: as measurements, adaptations/compositions, memories, machines and technologies, identities, narratives, sensitivities in an increasingly globalized and wrapped world.

Extended store has been a work of mapping the phenomena of digitalization that effects spaces and above all the world of retail. Shops will not disappear in the 21st century, but they will have to change (if they have not already done so) to survive. They will have to evolve by integrating technological solutions that are not only back-end (as they have done so far), but front-end, and therefore available to customers in the shop as in the cases reported in the book.

The book explores the radical transformation of living and working spaces, in which the hybridization of interior and exterior requires a new vision able to interpreter renewed people’s behaviours and needs, a challenging issue for the design discipline that has a multidisciplinary nature as well as a multiscale approach for both research and practice. Our ambition is to re-launch an aesthetic, sustainable, design-based approach to improve dwelling conditions, trying to implement care into different well-being dimensions – mental, physical, social, and global.

The book presents different perspectives of analysis and new models of experience, reconfirming the importance assigned to the wellbeing and human-centered approach in the contemporary spatial design disciplinary debate. The aim is to explore the transformation process which we are living, both in private and in public spaces, underlining the central role of design to define new qualities of connections to live together in relation with the space around us.

Neighbourhoods of contemporary cities are ‘hypersensitive’ and ‘fragile’ areas where dismantling and transformation processes generate fragmentation and displacement. Reconstruction and re-occupation of urban spaces guided by residents are becoming increasingly frequent in these places. This book presents some reflections on the role of design discipline in this fertile and proactive context, proposing specific research methodologies and intervention strategies in close relation with the resident population, building new skills, creating original synergies, and new processes of inclusion and social innovation.