Abstract

This book collects, in a revised form, a series of short essays written and published by the author between 2013 and 2017, as the editor of the Rassegna Section in Domus. Contents are organized into homogeneous thematic clusters, ranging from design to technology, concept, languages and production. In the 1970s, Manfredo Tafuri’s renowned essay entitled Architecture and Utopia made an important contribution to enhance the role of design within society. Nowadays, at a time when it is increasingly difficult to define shared needs and scenarios towards projects for the common good, a new dyad, ‘Design and Empathy’, seems to be a good summary of the expanding range of individual needs and desires the design promises to satisfy. There is much evidence of this phenomenon to be seen wandering around any architecture, design or art trade fair or exhibition. The whole world of the image, notably that of digital animation, tends to offer hyper-realistic aesthetic simulacra based on expanded mimesis and altered nature: this is the world of visual stimuli in which we are immersed daily, a far cry from the abstract modernity that we used to face in the last millennium. This condition can affect educational approaches to design, requiring a new way of thinking technology, methods and tools for the training and teaching of design: a new attitude towards the materiality of things, alongside the evanescent, immaterial illusion of the Internet of things.