“Requirements, Approaches, Visions in the prospects for development of Technological Design”

To comprehend the impact of the challenges and characteristics of our time on the regulation of Technological Design and to imagine the possible direc-tions, orientations, and visions in constructing future development scenarios, we must start from the full awareness of the original identity of the Technology of Architecture. It is a discipline inspired by the characteristics of openness, process, systematicity, connectivity, relatability, and experimentation, commit-ted to overcoming the apparent form/function dichotomy with a profound interest in investigating the need/performance aspects of designing, the relationships between innovation and permanence, and the more fertile relationships among materials, components, systems, techniques, and morphologies of spaces. This discipline is aimed at reasoning in terms of organized, interrelated, and complex systems; at grasping the necessary, ineluctable association between unity and diversity; at effectively exercising the role of unifying the process/design moments with moments of production/construction/development; and at carrying out the role of intermediation with reality, while holding together the epochal triad of environmental, social, and economic demands. It aspires to be an expression of a culture of design thought capable of carrying out the complex direction of technical and functional aspects, logical and morphological aspects, aspects of the behaviour and performance of architecture, as well as of narration to the users and of involvement, at the various levels, of the various parties – customers, operators, designers, stakeholders, users. In a word, it interprets the profound connotation of the expression “technological culture of design,” at all times animated by an anticipatory and visionary spirit. Our time is marked by questions that push towards defining it as the “era of crises and uncertainty” – questions in which Technological Design is a potential protagonist in the experimentation of innovative ways of designing in new contexts and new conditions, in the attempt and desire to provide some re-sponses to the main challenges of the future, which means: designing in a time of “crisis” (cultural, social, and economic); designing in “emergency” condi-tions (environmental/climate, humanitarian, housing); designing in a state of “scarce resources” (material and immaterial); designing in conditions of “un-certainty” (wholly cutting across the previous ones).