Design International - Open Access

Artificial intelligence is more-or-less covertly entering our lives and houses, embedded into products and services that are acquiring novel roles and agency on users. The design discipline and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field are just beginning to explore the wicked relationship between Design and AI, looking for a definition of its borders, still blurred and ever changing. The book approaches this issue from a human-centered standpoint, proposing designerly reflections on AI-infused products. It addresses one main guiding question: what are the design implications of embedding intelligence into everyday objects?

The book explores evolving perspectives on furniture, interior, spatial and architectural design, providing a multifaceted view of how the design discipline and practice deal with the complex and ever-evolving interplay between the physical and the digital realms. It explores the new frontiers of digitally enhanced design, investigating how computation capabilities impact the design discipline and designers’ thinking and practice, proposing captivating portraits of digitally enhanced design possibilities, from tools and processes to expressive potentials.

The issue of empathy as an embodied, dialogic experience that potentially enhances the value of human relationships, constitutes the core of this book, which is mainly addressed to explore whether empathy is designable and how. This book traces a theoretical framework for changing perspective on empathy in design, by integrating a phenomenological account. One that focuses on empathy's specific nature of intersubjective experience that introduces the other into one’s own personal horizon.

The Fashion System is one of the most polluting and most impactful industries on the environment. In the last decade the fashion industry has changed its approach, aware of the fact that the attention to the environment can no longer be considered a trend. This path shows the need to intervene in design terms and that the growth in responsibility and role of design, requiring reference scenarios, knowledge and new tools. The book defines the features and scenarios of sustainable development, as well as the evolution of sustainability in research and practice of fashion design, addressing the strategies for the design and development of environmentally sustainable products.

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.