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 This is why, in the past few years, it has often been replaced by more specific ones, which could clearly identify the relationships at stake.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.