Design International - Open Access

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 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 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.

Interior design is less and less reduced to the mere physical component of space and is instead increasingly projected towards an ‘environmental system’ made up of space, services, communication, and technology. The book highlights the close interconnections between the design of spaces, the creation of services, the application of communication systems, and the exploitation of technologies, allowing us to reveal the tensions and interactions that are unleashed depending on the prevalence of one or another design discipline and the scale at which they take place.

Which are the main research funds currently accessed by the Department of Design? What are the topics explored through them and which are the interconnections with the Department core research activities? Also, what are the research products delivered, the reached outcomes, and the expected impacts BY these research projects? The book synthesises the results of a qualitative analysis conducted over 32 research projects coordinated or participated in by the researchers of the Department in the timeframe 2014-mid 2021. The results of the analysis confirm the high-level attractiveness of the Department research profile on core topics such as design methodology, service design, and health.

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.

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 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 explores the relationship between time and the design of spaces. The temporal dimension of spaces is a horizon that has yet to be strongly explored. In the future it is increasingly likely that it will be the forms of time, rather than those of space, that will undergo the most interesting transformations. The essays explore time: as measurements, adaptations/compositions, memories, machines and technologies, identities, narratives, sensitivities in an increasingly globalized and wrapped world.