Design International

Biofabrication is giving us the chance to act a radical change of frame and rethink the way we produce and consume, and more generally the way we live and relate to the Earth habitat through our behaviours – strongly entangled with and influenced by materials, resources and processes we use. The volume aims to provide an insight into how design should approach the transdisciplinary field of biofabrication in order to play an active part in such material revolution, acting on multiple scales and shifting from micro to macro to connect the dots.

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.