Design, technology, empathy. A contemporary issue in the conception and production of artifacts.

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 defining - in a sort of manifesto - 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. The recurring presence of a new figurative representation of the expressive quality of artifacts –buildings and objects alike, both material and immaterial – is symptomatic of a search for a more user-friendly understanding. This is why the ‘abstract’- as opposed to the empathic - approach has been given less space. 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 is why we are witnessing the extension of an infinite landscape – which harks back to images from the Arts and Crafts movement – of finishes and surfaces, which may be reproduced today with the use of endless digital algorithms and which explicitly renew the figurative repertoire, reinstating the urge to mimic nature. This clearly marks a return, with updated tools, to the field of applied arts, where a new virtuosity – technology - regains a bizarre value. What seems to have recently prevailed is the idolizing of the technical dimension of know-how (können) over artistic intention (wollen). 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.