Design International

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.

This volume is part of an editorial project aimed at enhancing the history of design at Politecnico di Milano and, in particular, inaugurates the series The Masters, dedicated to the figures whose thought has fueled the cultural pluralism that is the hallmark of the entire institutional project. The remembrance of the Masters begins with Alberto Seassaro, the demiurge, a Dean capable of giving Design a home by conceiving and building the first Italian Faculty at Politecnico di Milano.

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.

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 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.