Design International

The book explores evolving perspectives on furniture, interior, spatial and architectural design, providing a multifaceted view of how the design discipline and practice deal with the complex and ever-evolving interplay between the physical and the digital realms. It explores the new frontiers of digitally enhanced design, investigating how computation capabilities impact the design discipline and designers’ thinking and practice, proposing captivating portraits of digitally enhanced design possibilities, from tools and processes to expressive potentials.

Traditionally associated with craftmanship and manual work, knitwear seems a quite unusual subject of investigation for scientific research. This book places it as an integrative part of the industrial design culture where the dialogue between a productive system of excellence and the design discipline taught in universities becomes a topic of central concern. The present book reports an experimentation conducted in the unique conditions of the Italian industrial design culture, that defined tools and methods to train knit designers not as artists, but with the technical and cultural knowledge and the project-oriented mindset that is typical of industrial design disciplines.

This book proposes an overview of the researches initiated in 2015 in the Design PhD programme of Politecnico di Milano. All of them explore the implications of the ongoing digital transformations, from the specific perspective of design research. Throughout the book, the cultural, organisational, social, and managerial issues raised by digital technology, are debated and how such issues call for a reframing of design processes, practices and models.

In a time when profound sociocultural and technological changes are affecting the design discipline, this book presents a number of consolidated and emerging issues in product design under four dominant perspectives: technical, human, digital and social. Different perspectives underlying modifications and adaptations of the design concept, together with the fixed elements that have characterized product design since its inception during the Industrial Revolution, are the subjects of analysis and discussion in the present book.

Biofabrication is giving us the chance to act a radical change of frame and rethink the way we produce and consume, and more generally the way we live and relate to the Earth habitat through our behaviours – strongly entangled with and influenced by materials, resources and processes we use. The volume aims to provide an insight into how design should approach the transdisciplinary field of biofabrication in order to play an active part in such material revolution, acting on multiple scales and shifting from micro to macro to connect the dots.