Design in the Digital Age. Technology, Nature, Culture

Design Culture is facing a renewed relationship between Technology and Environment, evolving from the vision of Nature as unlimited storage of raw materials and energy, to another in which Nature is recognized as a finite heritage to synergistically interact with. According to a such perspective, this seems to be the only possible vision to responsibly face the anthropogenic environment, as well as the further crises , mainly the socio-economic ones, plagueing the planet (from climatic emergencies to migratory phenomena and social inequalities). Moreover, the Design Culture has been for long undergoing deep transformations, determined by the increasingly diffusion of the digital (and somehow pervasive) technologies which introduce new paradigms, both cognitive and operative, within the traditional design thinking and its expressive methods. Design horizons have thus been widening their objectives and potentialities thanks to the rise of digital design approach, whose limits are still unknown. Therefore, the digital "revolution" is generating important changes in the dynamics of building production and processes, due to design has increasingly characterized by information input and the relationships between the elements that define its field of action. The scenario described above allows to define a new epistemological field where the Technology in the digital age seems to play a crucial role in the relationship between Culture and Nature. By this purpose, it is necessary to start a critical reflection to take up the challenge subtended to the changes that are taking place at the present, and to re-interpretated some of the classical dichotomies underlying the Culture of contemporary design, such as material-immaterial, subject-object, real-virtual, local-global, possibility-responsibility, knowledge-information, representation-simulation. This involves a paradigm shift in the relation between Culture and Nature, that is now based on a new design concept that assumes change and uncertainty as epistemological assumptions. According to this perspective, the Technology of Architecture becomes a field of feasible possibilities able at generating new producion modalities, so building and living in harmony with the natural systems. The book is therefore organized in three sections: 1_Technology and evolution of the eco-systemic approach to the design (ed. Marina Rigillo) 2_Technology and construction of a new material culture (ed. Sergio Russo Ermolli) 3_Technology and generation of innovative habitat (ed. Fabrizio Tucci) Massimo Perriccioli is the curator of the book structure and the supervisors of the whole work.