Design International - Open Access

What are the social facts that led to the need to activate social innovation processes? What is (and what can be) the role of design in these processes?
The challenges of modernity and post-modernity have led designers to become often protagonists and activators of sustainable and social innovation processes, possible thanks to users' and stakeholders' involvement in co-creation processes.
This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to eviscerate social innovation as a concept with its foundation in theoretical, political, and methodological domains. The present discussion will be based on sociology and design. The first will mainly define the theoretical framework of reference; the second will mostly deal with experimental and applied research dealing with social innovation.

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 volume is part of an editorial project aimed at enhancing the history of design at Politecnico di Milano and, in particular, inaugurates the series The Masters, dedicated to the figures whose thought has fueled the cultural pluralism that is the hallmark of the entire institutional project. The remembrance of the Masters begins with Alberto Seassaro, the demiurge, a Dean capable of giving Design a home by conceiving and building the first Italian Faculty at Politecnico di Milano.