Design International - Open Access

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.

This book investigates the role of interior design in the enhancement of the effectiveness of Non-Pharmacological therapies for Alzheimer’s disease care.  The author presents the conceptual model for an environmental system called “Therapeutic Habitat”, meant as a system of environmental interventions, based on tangible and intangible aspects, products and furniture, objects and services. Its aim is to enhance the well-being of people with dementia and stimulate recognition and interaction with the surrounding environment.

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 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.