Design International - Open Access

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.

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.

In a time when profound sociocultural and technological changes are affecting the design discipline, this book presents a number of consolidated and emerging issues in product design under four dominant perspectives: technical, human, digital and social. Different perspectives underlying modifications and adaptations of the design concept, together with the fixed elements that have characterized product design since its inception during the Industrial Revolution, are the subjects of analysis and discussion in the present book.

Biofabrication is giving us the chance to act a radical change of frame and rethink the way we produce and consume, and more generally the way we live and relate to the Earth habitat through our behaviours – strongly entangled with and influenced by materials, resources and processes we use. The volume aims to provide an insight into how design should approach the transdisciplinary field of biofabrication in order to play an active part in such material revolution, acting on multiple scales and shifting from micro to macro to connect the dots.

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.

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.