1,721,012 research outputs found
Design of plural public space
No full textIn recent decades, design has increasingly engaged with cities through a multidisciplinary lens, akin to that of humanities and social science developments. Designers endeavour to adopt
a cross-pollinated approach, strengthening interventions in complex and intricate systems such as contemporary cities. Public spaces are never neutral, as they have historically been designed, conceived and administered accord- ing to a norm that coincides with the concept of masculine universal thus ending up supporting and facilitating traditional gender roles, erroneously assuming that this represents a neutral universality. How can public space be designed to consider a plurality of perspectives
Design as pluriversality: the translational territory where practice is plural
No full textTranslating and integrating knowledge from other disciplines is, to a considerable extent, one of the crucial phases which has contributed to the building process of so-called design research, a concept that continues to remain open to many definitions.
Many forms of design research imply the translation of diverse fields of knowledge for the purposes of design implications. The general issue of giving form and validity to an inter-disciplinary or cross-disciplinary design competence, to be applicable in operational terms, is not new: however it has been only partially taken on board and to an even lesser extent resolved. The many decades of expansion of communication systems and technological innovation have generated a radical reconfiguration and widening of the baggage of design skills. An order of considerations of the greatest relevance, and one which can be referred to as refoundational, still revolves around the translation of those skills which tend to pluri-qualify the nature of the design profession
RED4MART: Reverse Engineering for Manufacturing Digital Archive to Enhance Advanced Craftsmanship Know-How and High-End Manufacturing Values
No full textCraftsmanship is in demand more than ever and we can see its rising appeal within modern society. The storytelling of tangible and intangible aspects of a crafted object is what crafts are about in today’s western societies. The maker understands the need for his craft to have a valid purchase potential. Why is a crafted object worse paying for and what is the story engraved into it? This last paradigm brings a new aspect of crafts and reinforces the fact that crafts are valuable goods not only in the production process but also through the message and story it carries. Italian manufacture of home furnishings consists of a system of SMES that have undergone profound transformations in various aspects, particularly in the progressive juxtaposition of innovative technologies to traditional craft processes, developing examples of advanced craftsmanship. This transformation occurred as a result of the emergence of the need to optimize processes and production methods to improve time to market, to a market that is increasingly fluid and demanding. The design research of department DIDA of University of Florence for the company Savio Firmino and for the company Baldi is then inserted in this context
Assets and Topics of Design for Envisioning
No full textSince its statement, we have presented the theme of envisioning in its possible (broad) forms. The response to the call on the part of the scholars has confirmed this multiverse interpretation, with interesting gradations depending on the personal path of the researchers involved, local happenings, and the traditions and perspectives of design which concern the research centers and the authors' different schools. The statement, multifaceted, takes on many levels and particularly underscores the theme of "time": variable, independent, and recurring in each one of the stories that cluster around this track. One can certainly affirm that "time", and design's relationship to it, is an essential dimension which is always the most emergent of the discipline
UX Designers Education and Practice: Making Designer as Topic Connectors to Enhance Intrinsic Complex Values of Made in Italy Craftsmanship. E.Craft Joint Lab Case History at Luisaviaroma.com
No full textThe word “design” is associated with specific disciplines, and, in turn complex. How is it possible then to define the formation of a designer? The "x-designer" always moves from research, for example to define exactly the needs, the context, the limits where the design process starts; s/he operates technical choices, which are ergonomically, aesthetically and economically correspondent. It becomes very difficult to find a positioning for the figure of the designer that is appropriate to other declinations and specificity of the modern designer
When technology becomes harmful. The contribution of designers at a crossroads between fashion, digital and ethics
No full textWhen facing the latest advancements of the digital technologies we feel divided in between the excitement of exploring unprecedented innovations and the fear of being overtaken by the technologies themselves. AIs, capable of learning independently, thinking and acting without being supervised in a variety of urban spaces and domains (Crawford, 2021) can take the most diverse forms and effects, leading to unpredictable implications (Roco, 2016).
With institutions not yet offering sufficient guidance and regulations in the field, the raising of digital technologies generates several ethical questions, together with fear and a urgent need of protection. Among the others, facial recognition and the collection of biometric data are significantly harmful, as they discriminate and deny several human rights (Amnesty International (2020). With facial recognition cameras, the facial signature can be captured and the data collected without consent or dissent (Kohnstamm, 2012); and despite data became a primary resource of economy (Zuboff, 2019), there is a tendency not to protect our first wealth and uniqueness and most people are not aware of the deployment of this technology (Pew Research Center, 2019; Ada Lovelace Institute, 2019).
If, as human beings, we see the concrete risk to lay in a condition of weakness, how do we position ourselves as designers?
Design itself is, as Bertola (in Bertola et al., 2021) wrote, one of the critical drivers of innovation when navigating the ongoing transition, due to its capacity of “linking manufacturing and technological systems with cultural and societal evolution” and to its approaches based on users’ and societal values. Indeed, design has always been a human-centric discipline, and thus can be the good guidance for a twin transition where the digital goes together with a sustainability that is not just environmental but regards human beings and rights.
Can design be a driver also when dealing with such harmful technologies as facial recognition?
While legislators and scholars have widely investigated the concept of privacy, the contribution of design in the context has received much less attention (Wong & Mulligan, 2019). Privacy protection is a strongly technology-based field, in which dominant engineering approaches assume that privacy is predefined and does not need to be challenged at the design level. Only in recent times design — especially critical design and partially service and UX design — started to explore the topic, more in a dimension of social-political activism and criticism (Zuboff, 2019) than in the design of producible solutions.
Today, the principle of Privacy By Design (PBD), recently included in the GDPR, introduces the human-centered design approach in the field of personal data protection, and requires organizations to develop designs with the right tools and methods to protect personal data.
Given these premises, the chapter investigates the possibility of designing in the anti-surveillance field, combining the critical part with the pragmatic-functional dimension. The goal is to understand the role that design and research undertake and the approach they should have regarding this problem of our present that will shape our future.
To address the ethical concept of individual privacy, the presented research adopts a multi-layered systemic approach, and is framed at a crossroad between fashion and textile-knitwear design with engineering for AI, computer vision and machine learning. In such a complexity, the human-centric approach is contaminated by the contribution of other disciplines in an advanced co-design process that uses digital technologies to generate a fashion product that protects the identity of the wearer from harmful digital surveillance.
The cultural assets of fashion, that shape individual and social identities through the material and immaterial values of its products (Bertola, 2021; Crane, 2012; Crane & Bovone, 2006), are combined with the high precision of machines and the high complexity of technology in the textile and knitwear field, that open perspectives on innovative technical performances for the development of advanced products, also in fields other than fashion.
Through a collaborative effort between engineering, fashion and knitwear design, the research developed an adversarial textile made with computerized knitting machines and resulted in clothes that embed adversarial images able to deceive the facial recognition systems, protecting people from artificial intelligence but making them aware and visible to the eyes of other human beings (Didero & Conti, 2022).
By reading the methods, process and the results of the research, the chapter reflects on how designers worked in handling the contribution of engineering researchers and experts in ethics and policies, not just in the development of a fashion product, but in the search of a multifaceted solution to such a complex global issue.
The ultimate goal is to observe how the methodologies of design foreground the ethics of design practice, and how such research can reveal potentially hidden agendas and values, explore alternative design values (Bardzell & Bardzell, 2013), give directions to understand how designers should place themselves at the edge between Computer Engineering, Design and Art and think of themselves as “an essential creative engine real-time informed about the impacts, actions and reactions of its surrounding cyberphysical ecosystem.” (Bertola, in Bertola, Mortati & Vandi, 2021, p.61
How Design can Contribute to Infrastructuring Bottom-Up Initiatives into Public-Interest Services.
No full textThis paper discusses an experimental “infrastructuring” process to transform bottom-up ini- tiatives into public-interest services,by using a set of design methods and tools coming from service design research.
The starting point is a renewed activism on the part of citizens that has led to a variety of initiatives which can be understood as new forms of services in between public and private, amateur and professional, profit and not for profit, market and society.The majority of these activities are characterised by transience and overlapping and need an infrastructuring pro- cess in order to avoid their weakening and ultimate failure.
Building upon this experimentation by “Creative Citizens”, this paper presents the main results of the author’s doctoral research, outlining an infrastructuring process in ten stages that focuses on collaboration among designers, citizens, institutions and local stakeholders. This represents an attempt to go further into the issues related to incubation and replication of solutions and, in a more extensive way, it might be viewed as an attempt to explore how social innovation could grow thanks to the design contribution.
Finally, the paper focuses on the role of designer within this process, shifting from the role of facilitator to that of change maker and advocate
In a Garden. Designing Gardens Through Storytelling
No full text“In a Garden”is a set of activities promoted in 2013 and 2014 by the City of Milan – in collab- oration with the Politecnico di Milano’s School of Design and two associations, Democratic and Participatory Design,(de.de.p) and the Zuppa Urban Project (ZUP).The aim of the activ- ities is to develop some design solutions for eight green public areas in Zone 9, an area in Milan to which the Bovisa Durando Campus of the Politecnico di Milano belongs, and to tell the stories about its people and their activities.
The School of Design’s involvement with“In a Garden”is via a trans-disciplinary approach, including interior/spatial design and communication/movie design.This approach aims to engage in co-creation activities and in conversation with the people of the neighbourhood and their needs in a series of stages that are, as yet, undecided.
Nowadays, the need to reclaim public spaces is shared among several stakeholders (asso- ciations, informal groups of people, public institutions) of the Zone 9.They are reclaiming its use, innovation of its functions and activities, safety, and maintenance.These eight green areas are in need of interventions at different levels:reinforcing their identity,redesign of the spaces, new urban furniture and open-air settings.
Further “In a Garden” explores, tests and prototypes transmedial stories as the driving force of identity-building processes, and as a means of engagement for the citizens in their renewal and reclamation of urban spaces and green areas
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