Practice of Consumption and Spaces for Goods/Retail Futures

The change in the significance of goods is a process that, ever since the end of the Industrial Revolution, has triggered far-reaching changes in society as the term has lost any meaning in relation to its purely functional character and increasingly come to represent symbolic and cultural contents. “Practice of Consumption and Spaces for Goods” has the aim to investigate contemporary retail spaces as complex places combining many aspects that go beyond the spatial and functional to include the physical, social, cultural, and economic.

Public Space “Under Influence”

This chapter explores the intersections between the notions of “urban interior design” and “public space” in West African cities. The artistic dynamics at work reshape the spaces by discussing their colonial imprint and the symbolism they have successively been charged with. As the nature of the projects is very diverse, both in terms of techniques and materials used and the objectives pursued, there is a clear desire to take greater account of the human dimension and to establish connections between local roots and the globalizing push. Through the analysis of some experiments carried out in Dakar, Cotonou, Porto-Novo, and Douala, the author identifies seven trends. The examples presented her relate to one or more of them. The projects combine the aesthetic approach with an ethical message: they translate into a citizen commitment to better, fairer, and more inclusive spaces.

Designing Interiors

The following is a theoretical reflection about the re-development of existing spaces. First, various changes in the way we live worldwide are considered, especially in industrialised countries. Then a process that spans from research to design is proposed to identify those actions required to reach an innovative response to the problem at hand. The second part of chapter illustrates a series of possible design strategies collected from the interior design work of past masters and contemporary designers. The goal is to offer a possible reading of certain important examples, providing an inventory, by definition an incomplete one, of design approaches, ways of thinking, and practices. Sometimes there is a common thread, sometimes not.

Rethinking Retail Design in the Experience Economy

This chapter seeks to explore and discuss the way commercial companies and non-commercial companies have transformed the design and the delivering of products and services offered. This work aims to contribute to the discussion of the character of interiors by exploring empirical cases. These cases exhibit experiences comprised of emotional as well as functional interactions between customers and service providers. Their key attribute is to deliver a personal experience that stirs feelings, sensations, and emotions that are memorable and inclusive. The result of this research intends to enable professionals to have a series of instruments that are multidisciplinary in nature so that they can use them in their design practice.

Notes on the Spatiality of Colour

This chapter explores colour phenomena through the lens of an architect. It proposes that colour experience is best understood as only partially a visual experience that has three interrelated components: the visual, how colours describe the spaces around us; environments, how colours change with their social, historical, and cultural contexts; and non-visible, what colours represent. What role does the chromatic imagination play in contemporary interiors space? The chapter proposes that spatial experience of any singular colour has a multiplicity of possible readings and dimensions, that there is no absolute value to colours. Our chromatic experience is mobile and fleeting, as the three components of colour experience shift and overlap.

Dwelling in the Leftovers

In a world studded with forgotten leftovers and abandoned buildings, there is a need to consider rethinking the traditional approach to design and architecture by imagining, instead of great new works, myriad precise interventions that bring all those spaces back to life appear forgotten and without value. Working on dismissed buildings is about multiple stories, forgotten beauties, and human absence. It's about fighting over-production and over-consumption in a world in which it's totally normal to buy and throw away things even if they are still new. Society needs to use what it's already built because it's enough. Society needs to use what it's already built by thinking of it in a new, more flexible, sustainable, and ethical way. Cross-disciplinary approach, short-time interventions, and low-cost interventions are the clue solution to make those abandoned architectural leftovers live again. This chapter proposes ethically, flexibly, and sustainably considering the variety and complexity of these spaces as a starting point and value and an effective opportunity to study contemporary urban dynamics.

Figuring Out the Interiors Through the Representation of Experiential and Interactive Environments

In the learning society, knowledge is the new capital, and the role of the designer encompasses a visionary and imaginative force that must translate the cultural dimension of the project into formal expressions but also ensure a functional and environmental character that is nowadays enhanced by digital technologies. Design does not solely restrict itself to designing the experience of use, the “economy of experience,” but introduces an innovative vision of systems or innovative access to cultural heritage in all its forms. The chapter exploits methodologies to support the experiential design process where the tools of representation are critical to simulate, prototype, and build interiors but also arrange the right set to control and validate the final perception of a space. A participatory application for the Cola Filotesio museum of Amatrice concludes the chapter: a prototype of a community center to replace by the means of a virtual environment the church of Saint Emidio, which was razed to the ground by the 2016 earthquake.

(more)SoftAssertions

This chapter examines the shifting landscape of disciplines and professions, with particular focus towards “Spatial and Experience Design.” In spite of trends and increasing examples of the erosion and overlapping of disciplinary and professional boundaries, there is a need for some sort of disciplinary and professional definition. There needs to be a body of knowledge and skills defined and practiced and routes to circumvent them. This is especially relevant in a world of inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary work and comprehensive creative practices. The chapter examines core aspects of spatial/interior design and how this may intersect with other related disciplines and practices. An articulated interior urbanism creates clear areas of contribution from “interior” designers within the city. The chapter explores these cross-fertilizations through the curricular use of intensive design workshops (often of one-week duration) with a singular focus of the student's attention; selected student works from two such workshops at Politecnico di Milano are included.

New Narrative Spaces

In exhibition design, and in the museum field in particular, the challenge of the designer consists of facing the complexity of reality by interweaving contents that they must reshape, giving them a narrative pace. The result of this recasting is a narrative museum. This is a concept that the author has developed through in-depth research and has implemented in actual museum projects in recent years. Conceived as a reaction against and opposition to the type of design used in the cases of the nail-in-the-wall museum and the funfair museum, the narrative museum makes the user the active protagonist of an interactive multimedia diorama. Presenting his perspective on this issue, the author argues the possibility of a polyphonic project, in which spaces are defined beyond forms with the aim of activating new usage patterns, placing an emphasis on the narrative quality of the place in directing the project.

Urban Interior Design

Nowadays the city of the anonymity prevails over the city of sharing. We move in more and more dilated spaces and we expand our territories, but we consume the community life in impersonal places that, too often, are only for casual encounters. For this reason it becomes more and more crucial to design spaces with wide recognition, characterized by an “accumulation of belongings” that makes them feel like familiar to everyone: the city, avoiding the risk of self-celebration, can find the opportunity to become a representation of a collective imagination in the sum of individual stories. The challenge is to experience the city as a sequence of “interiors” that people can intensely inhabit and not just use, in which people can leave traces, share memories, and imprint daily gestures. Places that satisfy emotional as well as functional needs, bringing into play the symbolic and intangible components, maybe imperceptible, but which are so decisive in determining the identity structure of a city. It is the relational dimension that acquires also an aesthetic code. This chapter explores a relational approach for resilient and experiential cities.