Design International

The book tries to examine, from an historical and critical point of view, how media technologies have influenced inhabited interiors during the last sixty years. Although the title Smart Home, the research is not focused on strictly functional and technical aspects of domestic interiors design (i.e. domotics), but more broadly on how human behavioral aspects have modified (and could modify in the future) living spaces in relation to technologies evolutions.

The Fashion System is one of the most polluting and most impactful industries on the environment. In the last decade the fashion industry has changed its approach, aware of the fact that the attention to the environment can no longer be considered a trend. This path shows the need to intervene in design terms and that the growth in responsibility and role of design, requiring reference scenarios, knowledge and new tools. The book defines the features and scenarios of sustainable development, as well as the evolution of sustainability in research and practice of fashion design, addressing the strategies for the design and development of environmentally sustainable products.

What are the social facts that led to the need to activate social innovation processes? What is (and what can be) the role of design in these processes?
The challenges of modernity and post-modernity have led designers to become often protagonists and activators of sustainable and social innovation processes, possible thanks to users' and stakeholders' involvement in co-creation processes.
This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to eviscerate social innovation as a concept with its foundation in theoretical, political, and methodological domains. The present discussion will be based on sociology and design. The first will mainly define the theoretical framework of reference; the second will mostly deal with experimental and applied research dealing with social innovation.

The environmental emergency of the last century has led to an urgent need to reformulate the predominant role of human beings on the planet by undertaking a less anthropocentric design approach. Within this theoretical framework, the book explores the role of Design as a multifaceted discipline capable of exploring the complexity of a changing world, and reconsiders the human being’s position in a pervasive relationship with the contemporary environments through a More-than-Human approach.

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.

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.

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.