Design International

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.

This book offers a key for reinterpreting interior design as a whole, in light of the narrative component of a kind of exhibition design that constantly addresses the measurement of time, which becomes the founding variable to be dealt with on the level of a project. Commenting on the evolution of exhibition design, the volume outlines its future sceneries, arising as an unicum from the perspective of the reflection on the role and the developments of this interior design branch.

Interior design is less and less reduced to the mere physical component of space and is instead increasingly projected towards an ‘environmental system’ made up of space, services, communication, and technology. The book highlights the close interconnections between the design of spaces, the creation of services, the application of communication systems, and the exploitation of technologies, allowing us to reveal the tensions and interactions that are unleashed depending on the prevalence of one or another design discipline and the scale at which they take place.

The volume investigates a wide sphere of issues referring to an extended concept of “matter” – the word matter intended not only as materials as such but also of content and relationships – through design actions, approaches, processes, tools and methodologies employed in different areas and with different objectives, yet united by the desire to intercept the current shift, sometimes reinventing and sometimes evolving programmatically over time to embrace the changed framework.