The design of surfaces, between empathy and new figuration

Nowadays design languages seem anew defined through images and figures that appear increasingly distant from abstraction. In the time that we live in, where it is prevailing a dominance of individual needs rather common desires, an abandon of abstraction in favour of new figuration, stimulates the opportunity to investigate a new dyad, ‘Project and Empathy’; these terms could summarize well the expanded modality of physical and psychological interaction between people – as individual – and artefacts, through the increasing role of surfaces. The whole world of postmodern image, especially through the digital technologies, tends to offer hyper realistic aesthetic simulacra, altered nature: this is the current world of extension of feelings and sense, in which we are immersed daily. This condition affect the approaches to design, which require a new thinking around technologies, method and tools from training to practice the activity of design: a new attitude for materiality of things, beyond the immateriality of digital reality.