PAD. Pages on Arts and Design

20-37

Authors: Jacopo Leveratto

Although the term habitat represents one of the most crucial ecological concepts for describing the relationship between some species and their environment, it is also one of the vaguest. This is why, in the past few years, it has often been replaced by more specific ones, which could clearly identify the relationships at stake. This is the case, for instance, of the term biotope, which recently, with the increasing awareness of ecosystem interconnectivity, has taken more and more relevance in comparison to the previous one. Whereas a habitat, in fact, is the sum of the physical and biotic resources of a place that allows the survival and reproduction of a particular species, a biotope represents the habitat not of a specific population, but of a whole biotic and sympoietic community. A feature that perfectly describes the characteristics of a new design approach, generally called more-than-human, here analyzed from both a theoretical and methodological standpoint, which today, to tackle major environmental challenges, focuses on building architectures in which multiple species can find some terms for cohabitation. And which, therefore, not only entails addressing a new class of subjects but also challenges the role of architects and other practitioners in this field by requiring new ways of designing that enhance interspecies coexistence and collaboration.

51-72

Authors: Silvana Donatiello, Mariarita Gagliardi

The aim of the paper is to examine how the advancement of technology is radically transforming the way we interact with the domestic sphere. The evolution of digital devices has brought new perspectives for redefining living spaces, raising crucial topics about the traditional function-based model. In this context, design plays a key role in shaping the technological revolution of Post-Domestic habitat. This model was challenged by several designer architects, including Joe Colombo and Superstudio. The integration of Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows the creation of heterotopic spaces, inspired by Foucault’s theory. In this perspective, the home environment is transforming into a fluid and mutable space where users can experience new forms of interaction and space relationship. This radical change raises important questions about the future of living.

98-120

Authors: Nicolas Bailleul

This paper is part of a research-creation project entitled RGB tour, which aims to contextualize the evolution and preservation of the bedroom space within the landscape of videos on the YouTube platform. Through a specific analysis of the room tour practice, we will explore how content creators maintain the usages traditionally associated with the bedroom space while transforming it into a technological entity evolving in parallel with emerging technologies and practices within the domestic environment.

149-168

Authors: Raffaella Fagnoni, Davide Crippa, Annapaola Vacanti

The article discusses the transformation of the Italian domestic environments in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of digital technology. It highlights two key trends: the hybridization of domestic spaces due to remote work, study, training, and socialising facilitated by digital tools, and the increasingly dynamic lifestyles of young people, particularly millennials and Generation Z, who tend to live in rented spaces and embrace remote work. It is then arguable that the identitarian value of domestic spaces is changing, as physical objects and furniture become more interchangeable due to the fast-paced and unpredictable lives of young individuals. This shift must prompt a discussion about how interior design is adapting to such sociological changes. Various options are available for designers to create value through sharing and renting services, drawing inspiration from similar models in the office furniture sector. The primary aim of the paper is to present novel scenarios for the design of domestic spaces, as the servitization of business models offers opportunities to reconsider how products and furniture are acquired and used, particularly as more adults don’t own the homes they live in and frequently change residences. Renting is proposed as an effective model for creating more agile and customizable spaces that align with contemporary lifestyle preferences.

193-208

Authors: Gerhard Bruyns, Daniel Elkin, Andrea Navarrete, Veronica Ching Lee

The desire to live vicariously, mirroring behavioural conditions external to one’s own home, gives each home multiple lives in a hyper-functional world. Technology’s fusion with the home produces two outcomes. First, the ability to capture comprehensive, three-dimensional records of a home’s physical conditions and traces using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, connects functional layout more concretely to behavioural scripts. Second, virtual mirroring converts transferable information about the home from generalities to hyper-specific singularities. A home’s digital twin can contribute to archives of domestic conditions disseminated as assets for access, download, and manipulation in other media. Behavioural simulation and gaming can simulate exact domestic conditions from throughout the world, rather than interpreted approximations. This paper draws on projects developing digital twins of homes in several locations in Hong Kong. Researchers are using 3D scanning technology to record homes in public housing flats and in the stilt house architecture of Tai O Village. The paper discusses technology and workflows employed, theorizing the technological and social impacts of domestic digital twins in data archives. The paper uses graphic precedents to demonstrate archiving protocols and speculate on influences the post-digital turn will have on domestic environments and behaviour.

227-253

Authors: Nicholas Thomas Lee

Through the development of a spatial installation entitled Vanity Chamber, this article reflects upon the role of specular devices within the home and asks how their increased use might affect boundaries between the domestic interior and the world outside. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns many activities previously reserved for the public domain suddenly had to take place in the home, via videotelephony platforms such as Zoom, Skype, Facetime and Microsoft Teams. Cultivated by a pre-existing intrusion into the home of digital specular devices, such as PCs and smart phones, which supported the increased use of videotelephony software observed during the pandemic, many people experienced a breaching of established domestic boundaries. Facilitated by these leaky thresholds, a simultaneous scrutiny from the spectator and a concern by the voyeur for the public display of the private interior was observed during lockdown. An analysis of historical specular devices has shown that acts of voyeurism and vanity on the limits of the home are far from novel occurrences, and that these porous boundaries were often important liminal thresholds bridging the domestic with the public. Through the Research by Design method that led to Vanity Chamber, this article argues that the domestic interior has once again become an essential part of its surrounding neighbourhood and that it is on this frontier, or rather, within this in-between realm that we must now establish home.

283-301

Authors: Anna Barbara, Elena Baharlouei

Mobility technologies, since the discovery of the uniaxial wheel, have strongly shaped the forms and times of cities and buildings and their interiors. The paper explores how newly developed flying transports, such as drones, may in the future reshape and alter the interiors of the buildings we inhabit. Utopias about cities with flying cars are a literature full of examples and theories, such as Andrea Branz/Archizoom’s No Stop City and Instant City and others, but also even more extensive cinematography such as Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, the flying vehicles, by which people as well as goods will soon move, introduce a fourth dimension (time) and will allow access to buildings from the roof and facades. They will recover the distributional logic of an iconic and historical typology of Milanese architecture, that of the edificio a ballatoio, in which the distribution of spaces followed a private/public logic that would lend itself perfectly to the buildings of the drone city. The article will explore the transformations in plans, materials, facades, ways of living, and relationships that, this coming revolution, will introduce into the interior spaces of buildings and our existences.

25-38

Authors: Vincenzo Cristallo, Miriam Mariani

In the digital age, the democratisation of a series of actions inherent to data management has, in fact, allowed digitisation to be interpreted as an operation to extend and relieve human memory (cognitive offloading, Storm et al., 2016). In the design field, the availability of data contained in the web in a wide but fragmented way would lead to the hypothesis of the advancement of a type of knowledge (and memory) characterised mainly by a spontaneous and disordered growth of information and non-linear narratives (Sendra & Sennet, 2022), as well as a different way of searching and using references in the project field. Referring to this background, with this paper, we aim to investigate the connection between percepts and concepts (Horn, 1998) relating to the use of digital storage in the disciplinary context of Design, integrating the observation of the phenomenon with multidisciplinary points of view. More specifically, it is intended to compose a critical framework within which to understand the characteristics of “designerly knowledge” (Dorst & Lawson, 2009) for the collection and archiving of digital visual material for design use, supporting the discussion through integration with various critical contributions from complexity science, psycholinguistics and perception studies. The aim here is to propose some models of interpretation on the subject that help to understand the organising and systemic modalities of Design for the management of uncertainty as a permanent condition of “contemporary data” (Sendra & Sennet, 2022). In particular, the variety of authors cited contributes to composing the picture that is intended to be returned on the subject of the organisation of digital references for the design of complex content.

63-89

Authors: Marco Borsotti, Marco Mason

In 2015 the conference Between the Discursive and the Immersive: Research in the 21st Century Art Museum by Louisiana and Stedelijk Museum, identified these two terms, discussed mainly concerning exhibitions, as indicators of a shift in the contemporary method of offering culture. Discoursive refers to a new curatorial form of interdisciplinary and synesthetic programming, while immersive looks at the spectacularization of the exhibition. This article, in the first part, introduces the term narrative, in between them. Through a narrative system, exhibitions relate themself to the visitor no longer only in terms of appropriate reproduction of knowledge, but rather in terms of generation of knowledge. Narrative amplifies the meaning of discoursive and declines it as the communicative capacity of the complex relational system “collection-significance-visitor”, opening up to a critical review of the concept of immersive, which often, operatively, it is interpreted in a purely filmic way. The second part introduces the concept of the Post-digital Museum (Parry, 2013) as a construct that contextualizes the “narrative” instance within the recent discourse of museum digital transformation. Any reading of design practices (Mason & Vavoula, 2021) within contemporary museums cannot ignore a paradigm shift in Digital Cultural Heritage, in which digital has become naturalized in museums’ “way of thinking.” This integration “marks a continued development of the museum’s concept and practice” (Arvanities, 2015). The post-digitally discourse will allow us to set the theoretical context and conclude with some reflections and illustrative examples on the practice of visitor experience design (Mason, 2017) in post-digital museums, which is particularly associated with the “design of narrative environments” (Austin, 2020).

118-134

Authors: Giulia Cordin

From the early 2000s, archives and cultural institutions have been confronted with the repercussions of an unprecedented digital revolution. Web 2.0 technologies have accelerated management and organisational processes that were already in place, enabling the digitisation of huge amounts of data. A process that has undoubtedly facilitated the preservation and use of these materials, but which has nevertheless brought to light new problems. These include the oblivion and non-use of digitised materials, which often remain unknown and unnecessarily processed if not supported by promotion and enhancement policies. Furthermore, new digital ways of engaging visitors are challenging traditional models of power and negotiation of meaning, but cultural institutions are not always ready to respond and support such practices effectively. The paper presents the case study of a smart interactive environment created in 2019 for the Temporary Slovene Dance Archive of the Metelkova Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. Through this work I critically discuss the role of design in respect to actions of retrieval and reinterpretation of digital heritage beyond the simple search of metadata on digital platforms. In addition the project proposes a physical experience to stimulate public use and understanding of archives.

155-

Authors: Michele De Chirico

Today there is a multitude of devices and tools to share technologically mediated memory practices that can be understood as agents collaborating in the “production of the world”. In the field of design of materials, materials libraries started out as cataloguing systems and then became the physical and digital place aimed at conveying material cultures intended as transitions of the intangible and semantic values of a society onto the tangible reality. By configuring repositories of tangible memory, as physical documentary heritage of a territorial and material culture, the role of design emerges in preserving, organising and transmitting the knowledge of the reality that surrounds us. This means transforming the current cultural spaces of the materials libraries to determine design trajectories aimed at making evident the unexpressed opportunities of the materials. The contribution is aimed at investigating the potential of a renewed service as a place of tangible memory, a generative device for conveying identity and valorisation of know-how, the genius loci, and the sense of materials as a potential and source of further design insights, by placing cultural heritage at the centre of the design approach. On the basis of the cataloguing of material samples as “materialised data”, a renewed interactive materials library service can convey the meaning of tangible memory to outline criteria for their knowledge, valorisation and use.

197-217

Authors: Martina Motta, Giovanni Maria Conti, Elisa Rossi

Born with a very artisanal and manual connotation, knitwear design has evolved into a highly technological industrial practice supported by digital tools and advanced machinery. For this reason, teaching in the field is a constant challenge requiring innovation and updated information, together with a memory of the more traditional aspects. The article reports a research work born at Politecnico di Milano upon the acquisition of the material archive of knitted samples donated to the School of Design by Marina Spadafora, a designer with a long-standing career in the knitwear field. Given the archive as a rich physical resource, collected and classified by the knitwear professional along her creative career as a daily-basis working tool, academic researchers questioned how they could extend its purpose to bring innovation to teaching and learning methods, combining the physical and the digital dimension. The research investigated the needs of knit design students, researchers, and professional designers to identify the advantages and the barriers in consulting the archive and connected the more theoretical notions about knit structures and the increasingly digital practices with the material heritage of the archive to result in a resource that stimulates students’ creativity and increases the learning experience.

243-269

Authors: Raissa D'Uffizi

Posters, brochures, advertisements, catalogs, and magazines constitute a fascinating cultural heritage to retrace the history of Italian graphic design. From the 1930s to the 1970s, graphic design enriched Italian communication with a revolutionary visual language. Various societies, foundations, associations, and public or private archives preserve graphic materials today. The result is the difficulty in creating a single place to preserve graphic design projects physically. This condition also reflects the digital archiving process of graphic materials. The absence of official digital conversion has facilitated the emergence of independent entities that make graphic artifacts accessible online. Sometimes online dissemination does not provide historical sources, and it is not primary digitisation. The contribution analyses the online diffusion and immaterial circulation of graphic artifacts. The research presents some emblematic cases to define original and no-original archiving processes. Archivio Storico del Progetto Grafico by Centro di Documentazione sul Progetto Grafico (CDPG), the digitalisation of magazines like Campo Grafico and Stile Industria, or independent projects such as Archivio della Grafica Italiana, are only some examples. The purpose is to identify critical and strong points of these archives and digital platforms, imagining a new digital archive for the Italian graphic design heritage.

21-40

Authors: Andrea Facchetti

As noted by Mouffe (2005) and Ranciére (2004), the new millennium inaugurated a post-political phase where the idea of consensus replaced that of conflict: the political, understood in its agonistic dimension, is reduced to a series of administrative procedures, in which moments of tension and conflict lose their critical potential and are resolved through a technical and rational calculation. One of the most common expressions with which the post-political phase of consensus has manifested itself, especially in the European context, is the idea of shared memory. In the last twenty years, the development of digital media has radically affected the way collective memory can be constructed, represented, narrated, and disseminated (Blom, 2016). While the intrinsic risks of the digital revolution have been widely discussed (in terms of fake news, historical revisionism, and in general post-truth), the possibility to understand and to approach historical documents and materials as living matter opens up new research trajectories and design approaches able to question the idea of shared memory, and to move closer to the image of entangled memory and mnemography (Feindt et al., 2014). This paper analyses and discusses some projects and practices in the field of infographic design and counter-forensic that could lead to a conflictual or adversarial understanding of collective memory as a contested terrain.

64-85

Authors: Carola Ureta Marín, Marcos Chilet Bustamante

This article presents The City as Text’s project – a virtual memory archive from the social uprising in Chile 2019 – that responds to the urgency of preserving the memory engraved on the walls faced with the threat of being literally whitewashed. A record over a single day, through the main street in the capital city where demonstrations took place, a few days before the government censored the messages written there. Through a hybrid process: an experiential walk complemented by a virtual work allowed the creation of a new kind of memory archive. An interface that invites people all over the world to revisit memory through the streets of Santiago. At the same time, the work explores topics related to the ephemeral nature of public space; the polyphony of protests; the importance of design/technology allowing interfaces that can help people to experience, understand and study political processes, even if they are miles away. The web platform could not be translated just into data. When those codes – guided by design – invite people to take a virtual walk, the information becomes an experience. In this context, the prevailing need to record, share and make it accessible becomes a question of design. The project also dignifies the role of design by documenting heritage in new formats. The City as Text – as an alternative historical archive – is also an invitation to build a more conscious, connected, inclusive, and respectful future.

106-131

Authors: Alessandra Bosco, Silvia Gasparotto, Margo Lengua

During the Coronavirus pandemic, museums were beset with serious difficulties. Forced to close for an indeterminate length of time, museum professionals and designers faced real challenges, which they addressed and used to seek to expand their offer, providing and implementing services to involve the public remotely. During the period under observation, museums, which have always guarded and enhanced the historicized heritage, extended to the present time their research into the tangible and intangible records of man and his environment and their acquisition, conservation, communication, and exhibition. Through the critical analysis of case studies, this paper intends to examine the museum’s role in constructing and enhancing memory tied to the present time – articulated in activities that refer to calls to action, curatorial projects, and the production of records – opening new scenarios for design. The configuration of a synthesis model made it possible to develop a matrix of elements that can be variably grouped to visualize the complexity and peculiarity of the actions undertaken by museums.

162-185

Authors: Andre Andrade, Lara Défayes, Emily Groves, Nicolas Henchoz, Delphine Ribes, Mathieu Salzmann, Andrea Schneider

Though museums are digitising their archives, online consultations remain low. New forms of engagement bring these digital memories to life and can support museums in maintaining and developing digital resources. Artificial Intelligence presents opportunities to showcase this rich heritage, but it also raises issues of transparency and cultural relevance. We explored these questions through a collaboration with Zürich’s Museum für Gestaltüng on its unique poster collection. We looked at how calculating similarities between digitised documents could create new user experiences with emotional and cognitive impact. Throughout the project, designers worked with engineers to investigate bespoke algorithms and graphic representations of their outputs. After an initial state of the art and preliminary tests, we developed three scenarios for a museum installation. Investigating three hypotheses, we evaluated the prototype scenarios with user experience psychology protocols. Our results show the value of combining artificial intelligence with curator expertise, the impact of similarities extracted by mathematical modelling and the importance of how they are visualised. We also found no significant difference between the perception of novices and experts in our results. This fosters a strategy for museums which brings different audiences together. The final installation, which combines elements from all three scenarios, opened to the public at the Museum in February 2022.

217-237

Authors: Alessandro Pollini, Michele Zannoni

Digital transformation fosters the acceleration of the flow of information in relation to the instantaneous nature and speed of digital tools and poses a reflection on the construction of personal memory through the use of the content on digital media. They do not allow us to consolidate the memory and are neither designed around man’s intrinsic need for forgetting. The lack of permanence of objects and the increasing process of emptying one’s personal space generated by the inevitable digitization of contents shows how this detachment from material reality negatively affects our relationship with our memories. This research aims to understand how interaction design and cognition are tightly connected in memory-related interaction projects: on the one hand, by considering how poorly designed interfaces conspire against memory, and on the other hand, how memory processes themselves are adapting to the transformation imposed by new digital information tools.

264-285

Authors: Clorinda Sissi Galasso

Today, the digitization of memory is a crucial issue. As institutional mnestic repositories, archives are deeply involved in digitalization processes and must reconfigure their theoretical paradigms to keep memory active. They must find new horizons of meaning in technology and design practices. In these processes, the resource problem is evident: only in a few cases can a complete digitization of preserved documents be carried out. GLAMs are limited to partial virtual migration to allow read-only and remote access. Considering the impossibility of a full analog-to-digital conversion, it is necessary to reflect on the fact that it is not enough to think about the proliferation of information but about the quality of the translation strategies. In this context, invented digital archives emerge, where documents are thematically juxtaposed to generate new interpretative discourses. In between, digital design practices can extrovert territory by recognizing the archive of mnemotopes: a dense network of spatialized memories and cultural objects of territorial interpretation. The paper presents two case studies in which design, especially communication design, leads to a digital mnemotopic representation that aims to stabilize these compound realities on the territory. Through a conscious reappropriation of personal memory and its territorial context, individual mnemotopes enter digitally into processes of collectivization, not as sites of mummification but of idea generation.

18-41

Authors: Margherita Tufarelli

The contribution proposes a reflection on the dual role of Heritage and the archive in the fashion system: if, on the one hand, it has allowed the creativity of the fashion system to support the very rapid dynamics of pre-COVID-19, giving life, with revival and reinterpretation, to a faster and more agile creative process; on the other hand, it is still possible to recognize in the Heritage the possibility of accompanying the system towards a new future permeated with an awareness of sustainable action.

69-85

Authors: Adriana Yumi Sato Duarte, Regina Aparecida Sanches, Rayana Santiago de Queiróz, Fernando Soares de Lima

Fashion is one of the most important industries in the world. It is complex chain and involves other industries in its processes, making it difficult to make a complete comparison in terms of pollution and socio-environmental impacts with other sectors. Socio-environmental sustainability is a relevant variable for fashion consumption, currently consumers demand greater transparency from companies, seeking to know where, how and who produced the product. The main objective of this research is to propose the use of smart tags for textile products, containing information on the steps and processes involved in the production of the textile article, in addition to guiding users and manufacturers in the post-use and recycling step as strategy to reinsert these products into a new production cycle. The knowledge of the impacts of the processes inherent to this extensive chain, the need for production transparency, performance and lifecycle of these products are important to establish not only management policies and reduction of disposal of post-use textile products, but also the interface with an increasingly conscious, demanding and engaged consumer.

110-128

Authors: Jose Luis Gonzalez Cabrero, Ana Margarita Ávila Ochoa

This paper aims to share methods used in design education, where new models of textile design have been developed by first recognizing “circular sustainable systems”. In the Huasteca region of México there are indigenous communities dedicated to textile production, they work in a circular sustainable system. The main characteristic of the system is that it shows a carefully developed balance of production using resources directly from its territory. This balance is usually reached, as in nature, with lots of years of molding needs and resources until it all comes together as a sustainable system. One of these communities was then used as a scenario for design students to develop new projects. The sustainable system allowed them to comprehend the cultural richness and the carefully balanced inputs and outputs of a community dedicated to silk: craftsmanship, knowledge, resources and their equilibrium established a different framework. The awareness of the circular sustainable system translated into interventions, co-design practices and participatory design, developing strategies for sustainability and circularity and coming up with textile products that supported and echoed the community’s already culture-rich crafts and designs. Starting in a circular sustainable system scenario, designers are encouraged to grasp the value of balance and sustainability, which leads to design only when the understating of the system fosters innovation from within.

155-176

Authors: Maria Claudia Coppola, Elisabetta Cianfanelli

Future has always been an essential dimension to fashion. However, recent practices in trend forecasting seemed to pull the future itself away from fashion, generating a tricky paradox where external issues – given by global challenges – and internal tensions – outlined by relentless market rhythms – clashed feeding fashion’s unsustainability. The pandemic event marked a point from which the next steps towards the future have to be thought of carefully. Thus, fashion firms need to develop new approaches to tackle global challenges, heightening their awareness of change and sharpening their visions thanks to a more reflective attitude towards distant futures. By analyzing how the fashion industry has been mastering the short-term horizons lately, the contribution aims to investigate the role and the responsibilities of forecasting practices in fashion, especially when it is intended to inform and give consistency to marketing strategies. Broadening the interpretation of forecasting through the lens of future studies, the paper aims to further the discussion on the potential paradigm shift to a fashion forecasting, where scenarios as tools to re-direct and re-tune social and environmental sustainability could offer support in the construction of new systemic strategies while building social narratives.

201-223

Authors: Chiara Scarpitti

The paper investigates some recent manufacturing processes of biohacking and synthetic biology applied to the fashion textile sector, comparing their laboratory practices, intentions and appearances. By linking heterogeneous knowledge in a transdisciplinary vision, the paper analyses their potential, combining case studies, processes, and arising aesthetics. In this scenario, the laboratory practices are configured as open study processes, oriented toward a new way of conceiving fashion manufacture, perfectly integrated with the planet’s ecosystems. Among the most interesting aspects, new forms of awareness, intimately linked to the nature to which humankind belongs, emerge, pushing the designer to the role of a catalyst of a sustainable and multispecies vision. Through an analysis of case studies, the contribution finally reflects the rise of an aesthetic-sensorial paradigm: the formless. All biomaterials and dyes deriving from living organisms seem to relate to this aesthetic category since they lead to a different conception of shape, color, and substance. In contrast to a classical aesthetic perfection, biomaterials and bio textiles often reveal textures that are dotted, shaded, imperfect, anti-hierarchic, opaque, unpredictable, and for this reason, they shake the viewer, destabilizing him. The contribution aims to promote an investigation into fashion-oriented bio practices connecting transdisciplinary knowledges to fascinating aesthetics for the consolidation of new fashion imagery.

22-45

Authors: Carla Langella, Gabriele Pontillo, Roberta Angari

Over the last few decades, design has become part of the realm of food in an increasingly incisive way, with the designing of both functional and communicative products at the service of nutrition as well as of food itself. Design for food, through the interpretative filter of contemporary sciences and interdisciplinary experiments, takes the opportunity to consider the future scenarios of nutrition along with the possibility of finding adequate solutions to the increasingly stringent needs for well-being, health, and sustainability. In this perspective, the scientific literature underlines the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, whose antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, soothing properties, as well as the presence of vitamins, mineral salts, and fibers, constitute a precious heritage to be enhanced and translated into contemporary lifestyles, as they favor the prevention and reduction of various pathologies. This important baggage of scientific knowledge opens up new and unexplored fields of design experimentation for the discipline of design that is able to guide, convey and modulate the values and potential benefits of Mediterranean food culture through the design of artefacts that can be imbedded into everyday life, becoming an instrument for the treatment of psycho-physical well-being.

69-94

Authors: Claudio Gambardella, Ilaria Masullo

The Moroccan poet Mohammed Bennis writes that the Mediterranean “[…] is no longer just a historical and geographical entity […] it has turned into an idea, aspiring to reconcile its own peculiarities – that is, plurality, variety and diversity. […] Mediterranean culture embodied tolerance, dialogue, and open-mindedness. It was a song of migration and a shared imagination. It would reconnect what politics and economy would divide”. This cultural idea of the Mediterranean, that joins plurality, variety and diversity, can help to ease tension between two cultural territories that often lie apart and need reconnection, that is design and craftsmanship. The Mediterranean man has become skilled at building bonds, connections, bridges. This inclination makes for a gentle, yet deep harmonisation of “different worlds’’. There are no miraculous solutions, all we can do is patiently listen and understand those that appear as “islands”, kept apart by the sea. The paper, in its final portion, will describe the educational activities carried out both during an Industrial Design Laboratory – in the context of a Bachelor’s Degree – and in a few graduation theses where students designed porcelain items to be manufactured in Capodimonte, which forms part of the local production excellence in Campania. Regardless of its outcome(which was, by the way, indeed interesting), such an experience falls within the framework of a mediterraneanization of design culture, enabling it to build connections where there are none, and where separation seems irreconcilable.

125-152

Authors: Aybeniz Gökmen, Fatma Nur Gökdeniz Zeynali

Marriage is a significant part of almost every culture. As a cultural phenomenon, marriage consists of traditional patterns that connect material and spiritual culture and give it belonging to a culture. The dowry tradition, which is a common part of this pattern; includes all kinds of material items that are prepared, made, or purchased consisting of cultural-specific spiritual elements for newly married couples to use in their new lives. The concept of dowry, which is evaluated within the scope of intangible cultural heritage, is a composition and collection of objects that carry a lot of cultural information. Due to its structure, the dowry concept, which refers to the practice of making, purchasing and exhibiting, is encountered in many cultures around the world. However, this practice, which is completely shaped by cultural knowledge, carries traces not only from ethnic differences but also from socio-cultural changes. In this context; it is aimed to concretize and discuss the results of the interaction of dowry, which is a long-established tradition of productivity and creativity, with industrial production and socio-cultural changes from the beginning of the 20th century to the present in Turkey. In the study, socio-cultural changes in society on the based on periods and the changes they created in the dowry phenomenon were mentioned. Today, some non-traditional items and practices have also been traditionalized and belong to the dowry tradition. It has been observed that objects and practices belonging to the dowry tradition are influenced by developments in many political, economic, technical and cultural fields. Another important result is the inclusion of non-traditional industrial products in dowry rituals and becoming traditional. Sometimes not only objects but also some practices constructed with these objects have become part of the dowry tradition and the tradition has been reinvented.

179-209

Authors: Sara Coscarelli

There are several similarities that point to the aesthetics of design between various countries that address the Mediterranean. Although it is well known that design practices have always been common in this area, it is also the transfer produced between them due to trade and cultural exchanges produced throughout history. This transfer generates synergies and transformations between design resources of the local cultural traditions. It is the case of interior design done during the decade of the thirties in Catalonia, through the publications of the GATCPAC magazine D’Ací I d’Allá [From Here and There], whose articles demonstrate how important traditional Mediterranean design is at that precise moment, in which the Catalan territory is in the middle of the interwar period and supposedly under the emancipatory umbrella of the International Style. However, it is already observed in the 1930s that there is a common thread that links the apparently rationalist design methodologies of Lombardy and Catalonia, led by Gruppo 7 and GACTPAC groups of architects, with a certainly Mediterraneanizing trend. And the common reference of both realities is detected in the figure of Le Corbusier, who at the end of the 1920s, he begins to enter towards the Mediterranean regional universe.

235-255

Authors: Laura Succini, Margherita Ascari, Elena Formia, Valentina Gianfrate, Michele Zannoni

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is considered at EU level as a cross-cutting priority to encourage societal actors to work together during the whole research and innovation process, aligning results and outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society. In order to investigate the relation between Design Cultures and the multi-level perspective of RRI principles, the Advanced Design Unit of the University of Bologna has launched the 2020-2021 Winter School “Design for Responsible Innovation” working on multiple ecosystems (Italy, Mexico and Chile) with their own territorial capital. The Winter School represented a first experimentation of a methodological approach that was gradually co-designed among the research groups involved, in order to work on an inclusive and non-hegemonic knowledge system. The relationship between the RRI dimension and the design disciplines has led to the creation of an iterative framework, in which the methodological approach has allowed to identify actions and tools to investigate and test how the processes and practices of Design, integrated with the RRI approach, could help to activate dynamic processes within social actors at transnational scale, and can facilitate the design of product-systems able to contribute to the big challenges of the present. The description of two experiences about Gender Equality topic, led the discussion about current educational design model that moves from local to the international dimension. The mutual exchange among teachers, young designers, and institutions creates new learning opportunities beyond territorial borders, introducing the Responsible Thinking and Education as a key to train future designers, able to take a role in mixed groups of interest and power.

282-306

Authors: Antonio de Feo

In a social and economic context that moves according to rapid patterns, in a contraction of time that paradoxically distances the past and brings with it an increasingly innovative future, photography can become a historical memory of ancient designs close to social and cultural values and traditions. The waves of the Mediterranean are ploughed by ships and small boats, projects that find their roots in the most ancient of human history and are still present today and continue to unite lands and men. It is the boat that merges the sea between lands. The gozzo, a small wooden boat, is an ancient project that was able to exploit knowledge from the past. The contribution intends to investigate how photography has been and still is today an important tool for telling the story of the past and useful for handing down forgotten forms and views. The heirs of that specific knowledge, of that past which formed an entire society, are destined to disappear: the photography of construction sites, tools and craftsmen represents one of the privileged ways of keeping memory of this history. Design, understood as a wide-ranging design process, can become the historical memory of society, and photography, which has always been a tool for sharing and a means of communication, can transform itself into an opportunity for historical and social investigation, always carrying with it the Barthesian axiom of what has been.