Into the rigid cultural separation we are used to do, in terms of disciplines, knowledge, and most in general into approaches and practices, there is a place — quite messy — also to design. Design has an inevitable economic and social impact indeed: it reaches to move the artificial and the spiritual at the same time. While it removes real problems, it interprets and produces other ones. Its multicoloured nature lay onto a wide range of matters, few of them are crucial, such for instance as designer’s and user’s logics. In respect of that issue rises this 7th conversation with Alvise Mattozzi, whose research — characterized by semiotics and sociology, a precious tradition originated in Italy — reaches from design and technology studies up to the use and circulation of images within both pop and scientific cultures. Professor Mattozzi uses semiotics as a descriptive method within his researches. He always has taught in design schools, in the last ten years he has been working next to Professor Kris Krois at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano with whom they founded the Master of Arts in Eco-Social Design; a practice-based design course which integrates social sciences and design. Since 2018, Professor Mattozzi is also committed with the Science and Technology Studies course at the Politecnico di Torino. He is, as other thinkers proposed by the DT — Conversations column, a torchbearer of humanities. As usual, his answers were recorded synthesized and then, this time, given that the interview was carried out in Italian, translated into English. …
Despite this topic is very delicate due to the various interpretations and studies which are still ongoing, constructivism concerning design practice seems to be a foundational part, especially by the view of the incremental way designers manipulate information, knowledge and culture. In very short, it represents a really interesting epistemological stance if we think about the establishment of design theories and ethics.
Therefore DT Column proposes to pass through a few “classics” of design practice by that specific worldview, and does that thanks to the availability of Doctor Gabriele Chiari. He is a psychotherapist engaged into several fronts of research and teaching. Doctor Chiari was a teacher of Clinical Psychology and Psychodiagnostics at the faculty of Psychology of the University of Florence. Since 1993 he is co-director of the Specialization School in constructivist psychotherapy namely the CESIPc of Florence, where he teaches narrative-hermeneutic psychotherapy, a specific branch of the personal construct psychotherapy from G.A. …
The weak issue concerning what we call “mind” and “body” and their strong bond in experiencing the world, the endless questions about the several interpretations of what we are used to seeing as “reality” or “human being”, the hard analysis of people’s behaviour — which could explain: what does being alive actually means? How do human beings behave in modelling their lives? These questions, despite their apparent “philosophical” nature, could find an important “wave” of pragmatic understanding through the precious answers of Professor Karl Friston.
He is an authority within the theoretical neuroscience field and has engaged with some of the most important issues — from neurobiology to embodiment, via neuronal interactions. His unifying discoveries and experiments are building very important bridges among the cognitive sciences, medicine, and physics. This interview won’t be able to completely cover Professor Friston’s impressive research, but it will certainly be an important reference for all the designers who are interested in the way people think and act. …
Even this time, this conversation is contributing to the attempt of limiting the wide and deep multi-dimension of design research. Hence, qualitative research that is as “rigorous” as quantitative one — explain us the chairman of this discussion — are two words which represent an entire mixed bunch of activities for designers and that can not be avoided. So DT-Conversation is lucky to encompass this crucial issue with professor Mario Cardano.
Mario Cardano teaches Qualitative Methods for Social Research and Sociology of Health at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the Università di Torino. He is also director of the Qualitative Research Lab where several practitioners from Italian universities are reunited, on one hand to promote and consolidate the qualitative research and, on the other to provide scientific-methodological consulting. …
In this occasion, I have had an opportunity for exchange with Claudio Bezzi: sociologist and professional evaluator. Hence this conversation aimed to highlight “evaluation” as an important issue which is always present and beneath design practice. A large part of what seems to happen in that indeed is to evaluate between worlds. In particular between “existing” and “non existing” ones, between “actual” and “potential” products or services, especially within its critical dimension.
The professor Bezzi has always been committed to public policy evaluation, and the administrations’ actions, but also to evaluative and sociologic methodologies. He is co-founder, — and has been director, of the Associazione Italiana di Valutazione, and Lead editor of the scientific journal of Rassegna Italiana di Valutazione. A prominent researcher with the Francoangeli publisher, and he is author of several works: il disegno della ricerca valutativa; Cos’è la valutazione?; Fare ricerca con i Gruppi; Il brainstorming: pratica e teoria. …
When thinking about design, and through design, it is essential to face our relationship with knowledge and information. In the design discipline — as in most of the general design actions, dozens of conceptual dynamics are often difficult to keep track of. In other words, the relationship that we experience between our knowledge, or what we think is ours, and reality is such a self-referential union that often make us tend to separate things between subject and object.
However, without any pretence of drawing up a new theory of knowledge, nor of addressing the question of metaphysical realism, this precious interview has the pleasure of going through these questions from a psychological and cognitive point of view thanks to the important availability of Steven Sloman, who has published in 2017: The Knowledge Illusion. Why we never think alone co-written with Philip Fernbach. Therefore this conversation aims to investigate some crucial aspects of our thought mechanisms, opening up to touchpoints with design practice. …
What is the value and the quality of information? And how does the shaping of data chains work to conceive a meaning perspective? Well, in the end, this semantic and cognitive dimension separated apparently from the action, is a crucial part of any design framework.
Artefacts speak to us and make clear their setting of usage. The meaning, Luca Rosati told us, has to be constructed and organized. Luca Rosati is a designer sui generis, in terms of information and linguistic background. He is an author of several papers and books. His latest work, Sense-making. Organizzare il mare dell’informazione e creare valore con le persone is a well-conceived guide, quick and practical, to understand the basics of information organization, showing also the different natural ties with the humanities. …
Almeno in teoria, questo sarebbe l’ultimo Topic di questa rubrica dedicata alla cultura del design. Almeno in teoria, come scritto nell’Intro, questo dovrebbe essere un Topic dedicato a decifrare quale tipo di strana intersezione sia il design. Bene, sembrerebbe impossibile, almeno in teoria, decifrare una pratica che si ridefinisce alla velocità delle novità, in termini estetici e culturali, che introduce nella realtà. Ma questo non è un abbandono, piuttosto è il classico incubo di ogni designer consapevole. Partendo quindi dalla semplice immagine dell’essere umano immerso nel mondo reale, il design appare come uno spazio socio-materiale che connette, in un’entità valutativa e previsionale, questi due “attori” principali. Il primo attore è fatto di scosse e sangue, il secondo invece è la concretezza della realtà. Infine c’è il design. Un’intersezione caotica dove diverse energie, concettuali e fisiche, convergono parlando e interagendo l’un l’altra e con i simboli della storia. …
Design topics — 1x5, The intersection of Design: the embodied space where to process the Being human
In theory, at least, this would be the last Topic of this column devoted to design culture. And in theory at least, as written into the Intro, this should be a Topic devoted to decipher what kind of weird intersection design should be. Well, it would seem impossible, at least in theory, to decipher a practice that redefines itself at the speed of novelties, in aesthetic and cultural terms, which it introduces into reality. But this is not a dropout, it is rather the continuous nightmare for any conscious designer. Therefore, starting from the simple image of the human being immersed in the concrete world, design appears to be a socio-material space that connects, into an evaluative and provisional agency, those two “actors”. The first one, in fact, is made of shocks and blood, and the second one is the concreteness of reality. Finally, there is design. A chaotic intersection where different conceptual and physical energies, converge talking and interacting with each other and with history. …
The fourth Topic of this column deals with the currently growing phenomenon of participatory designing, also known as co-design. As highlighted since the Intro, in fact, especially in today’s capitalist context, co-design appears to be a practice of great value and a source of emancipation for both the private/public sectors, that find new configurations in the connective encounters co-design practices provides them. As Sangiorgi, Patricio and Zurlo correctly pointed out regarding the ServDes Conference held in Milan in 2018, design stimulus, above all Service design, tends to make “design knowledge tangible and transferable and build design capabilities in organizations and communities”. And again: “this basically entails the compilation of numerous toolkits, the organization of training initiatives and the establishment of in-house design/innovation labs”. Therefore, from an organizational viewpoint, today “design” takes the form of thousands of people (internals and externals to an organization) who are supposed to reach efficacy, creativity and consistency between their tasks, so that all the intra-exchanges — which, as emphasized within the previous Topic, should also reckon with ethics — are effective and produce innovation. And it is important to acknowledge that the increasing usage of participatory design practices is accounted for by the constructive and enabling impact it has on people. Indeed, it employs cultural/interpretative envisioning (even though it is not the only one possible) as a participatory/prospective medium to achieve the strengthening and transformation purposes of an organization. Considering the context in which organizations try to tackle that innovation “challenge”, or a structural socio-technical dynamism, co-design turns out to be important on account of its capacity to intercept and allow clear ongoing phenomena: firstly, the urgent demand of people’s participation within transformation and change processes; secondly, the general democratization of innovation and design thanks to the spread of user-driven approaches. Finally, in this wide range of design activities, in addition to ethics and design culture, a deeper, extremely human skill is activated: collaboration. As sociologist Richard Sennett maintained in his seminal work Together, collaborative capabilities “emerges in the context of shared experimentation and communication”. In fact, by exploring co-design practices, collaboration, learning, and experimentation can be nourished and increased, into a participatory lens. …
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