Design International - Open Access

The book explores the radical transformation of living and working spaces, in which the hybridization of interior and exterior requires a new vision able to interpreter renewed people’s behaviours and needs, a challenging issue for the design discipline that has a multidisciplinary nature as well as a multiscale approach for both research and practice. Our ambition is to re-launch an aesthetic, sustainable, design-based approach to improve dwelling conditions, trying to implement care into different well-being dimensions – mental, physical, social, and global.

In Uruguay, collaboration between designers and manufacturing companies remains limited, largely due to the historical separation between the academic sphere and the productive sector. Design has often evolved within theoretical or cultural frameworks disconnected from industrial practice. This book seeks to bridge that gap, presenting a design intervention aimed at creating spaces for exchange and collaboration between those who design and those who produce.

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.

In October 1993, the first Bachelor’s Degree Program in Industrial Design in Italy was inaugurated at Politecnico di Milano. This volume – Issue Zero – launches a publishing initiative that, grounded in a reflection on the historical memory and cultural roots of Politecnico di Milano’s Design System, aims to sustain the distinctive forward-looking spirit of Polytechnic design culture. Its goal is to place design at the service of today’s cultural, social, technological, and environmental challenges.

The fashion industry is entering the dynamic global competitive market, promoting various actions prioritising design, creativity, sustainability, and technological advancement as pivotal factors. The book analyses the multifaceted nature of the fashion retail experience through the lens of the design discipline, aiming to contextualise the evolution of retail within increasingly complex processes, networks and interconnections, both theoretically and practically.

The volume investigates a wide sphere of issues referring to an extended concept of “matter” – the word matter intended not only as materials as such but also of content and relationships – through design actions, approaches, processes, tools and methodologies employed in different areas and with different objectives, yet united by the desire to intercept the current shift, sometimes reinventing and sometimes evolving programmatically over time to embrace the changed framework.