Design International - Open Access

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.

This volume offers a critical reading of Packaging Design in the Digital Age, tackling the issue of packaging for e-commerce and the strategies that designers can put in place with a view to sustainable innovation. Then the book explores the main types of e-commerce system to identify the existing material and immaterial flows and the related problems, from which the authors set out future systemic visions towards sustainable development. Case studies of packaging and e-commerce systems complement the different chapters to offer practical examples of innovation.

The book focuses on four exemplified EM&Ts areas as results of the methods, gaps and issues related to their teaching methods. The four areas are: Experimental Wood-Based EM&Ts, Interactive Connected Smart (ICS) Materials Wearable-based, Carbon-based & Nanotech EM&Ts and Advanced Growing. It provides the setting up of a common/ novel method to teaching EM&Ts: to create new professional in young students, and to develop new guidelines and approach.

Starting with the knowledge related to Ergonomics in Design and design for inclusion, this book aims to provide an opened and integrated point of view to the disciplines of cognitive psychology, pedagogy and human-computer interaction. It configures as a flexible tool for understanding key aspects concerning the use of technologies and their effects, with special regards to the experiential dimension on a human scale, particularly tailored to weaker people.

The history of puppets happens to be the one of human evolution, because puppets have inhabited human religious rites, technological experiments, artistic purposes and have been used as entertainment tools. This volume focuses on a specific typology of puppets, the animated ones, used even today as protagonists of stop-motion films. By engaging an interdisciplinary analysis of animated puppets’ manufacturing processes, this book places a challenge: it merges design and film studies’ methods of analysis and applies criteria of material examination of design objects to investigate puppets’ material aspects.

This book proposes an overview of the researches initiated in 2015 in the Design PhD programme of Politecnico di Milano. All of them explore the implications of the ongoing digital transformations, from the specific perspective of design research. Throughout the book, the cultural, organisational, social, and managerial issues raised by digital technology, are debated and how such issues call for a reframing of design processes, practices and models.

Traditionally associated with craftmanship and manual work, knitwear seems a quite unusual subject of investigation for scientific research. This book places it as an integrative part of the industrial design culture where the dialogue between a productive system of excellence and the design discipline taught in universities becomes a topic of central concern. The present book reports an experimentation conducted in the unique conditions of the Italian industrial design culture, that defined tools and methods to train knit designers not as artists, but with the technical and cultural knowledge and the project-oriented mindset that is typical of industrial design disciplines.

This book offers a key for reinterpreting interior design as a whole, in light of the narrative component of a kind of exhibition design that constantly addresses the measurement of time, which becomes the founding variable to be dealt with on the level of a project. Commenting on the evolution of exhibition design, the volume outlines its future sceneries, arising as an unicum from the perspective of the reflection on the role and the developments of this interior design branch.