Abstract
The chapter focuses on the contemporary project, interpreted using the paradigm of interactivity as privileged reading key. Indeed, the changes (both social and technological) brought by the IT revolution and the information society force design to face new challenges, calling upon it to rethink the traditional categories of space and time. Today we are witnessing a more integrated fusion between physical products and digital images; the traditional boundaries between different environments are now dynamic and interactive communication interfaces; spaces become “perceivable” and the standard design of finished shapes seems to be replaced by the planning of reversible strategies. The project itself is what triggers different actions and is responsive towards its interlocutor, also thanks to a technological evolution now allowing a new osmosis between man, media, and space. The result of it is a sensory amplification defining immersive environments and setting new boundaries for the discipline that finds in exhibits its own privileged field of expression and research.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Dematerialisation: Tendency of the project to cross the borders of the intangible using the “non-material” as a category of thought, work tool, and material “to shape.”
Innovation: Introduction of new systems of user-experience, new sets of thoughts, new methods of production of artefacts, new technological devices supporting the project and able to boost a deep change with respect to a traditional method.
Strategy: Complex of planning actions preparatory to the project, system of conceptual maps acting in abstract terms regardless of styles, languages, shapes, that can correspond to multiple physical consequences.
Situation: Contextual and objective condition “framing” the behaviour of a person or a community that, in design terms, gains also an executive value.
Interaction: Action-reaction occurring between two or more people, but also between an individual and the system of objects or spaces surrounding him, mostly triggered by technological devices and determining a mutual influence between them.
Relation: Relationship between two or more people, as well as between people and their environment, engaging at the same time the symbolic and emotional functional sphere.