ISIA Roma DESIGN

Cities of the habitants or Megalopolis of the nets
"Design of the System between Sensitive and Intellective"

prof. G. Marinelli De Marco
Vice Director Isia di Roma, Italia. School of design of the University Ministry
professor of Metaproject Design II graduate level. Member of Academic Council,
professor of Basic Design at the I level. marinelligiu@tiscali.it

prof. M. Palatucci
Isia di Roma, Italia. School of design of the of the University Ministry
professor of Interaction Design II graduate level. mauro.palatucci@gmail.com

Difficult life for contemporary project without contexts and Communities

The ISIA of Rome, born in 1973 as historical experimental design school of the state, since many years has set up a careful rework of the conceptual paradigms of the design, arriving to the definition, in the second graduate level, of "Design of the Systems".This definition wants to deepen the sense of a constellation of meanings around the new geography of knowledge, technologies and creativity, in the contemporary society, the design attempts in particular way to the relational and systemic aspects in the human landscape, both material and immaterial.
The Design of Systems sees foreward the enunciates of the Sciences of the Complexity, the elaborations of the not linear thinking, and observes with much interest the principle of autopoiesis, of autorganization, facing the characteristics of emergence in a system. In such sense our engagement is to carry a disciplinary contribution to these theories being part of a patrimony of experiences consolidated in the area of the product, the morphogenesis and above all of the Metadesign that in it lives very many years, being able to use the stimulating contribution mathematics and systemic courses of high profile.
A careful reading of modernity, completed or incompleted, tell us how the culture of the design was born within a versatile laboratory, around a shared project, of possible Community in the industrial era, the whose philosophy made by a multifaces metanarrative thought, also a lot divergent between them, but joined from final desire of this community. In spite of the wealth of this diversity, the Modernity in last analysis, has seen to emerge as dominant metanarrative the interpretative philosophy of the linear perspective, using its emblem the modular geometry and the numerical approach to the project.
The relationship between subject and object, has lived many seasons from the reinassance, shifting the focus of the center of the draw to the static principle of the reinassance perspective, that it is also an explicit metaphor of the figure of the Prince assumed from Machiavelli. Therefore the principle of absolute objectivity and recognizability that alloy construction and rappresentation, and that include all the variety of the world in only one vanishing point. Starting from the Reform the birth of Capitalism, of scientific and technical development, the equilibrium subject-object has shown much instability, especially during the XX century, until finding itself in the actual postindustrial society, in a globalized and informatic landscape that's rebuilding around the requirements of the own human time-space experience. Everything brings us to think that the contemporary subject is shifting from a "perspective society" to an "a-perspective" society, that redesigns around this new axis of the sense the presupposition of the social semiotic praxis of knowledge and languages.
The contemporary postmodern condition, appears therefore like an infinite probability of "relational models" within an Hypertext scheme that, as in the observations of Z. Baumann, (1) is lacking of final draw or a complete scene. The same Baumann annotates as the term postmodernity is in part inadequate, in the sense that modernity is read like indefinite process and perhaps also infinitely, replacing to that term with "liquid Modernity" (2).

Prospectic and a-prospectic society, imagination as project

The eclipse of the perspective condition and its hegemony of four hundred years, coincides with emerging of the opposite condition that focuses on the subjectivity, the more important weight of the new metanarrations, operating an immense critical review of those project categories that, as an example, explained the architecture like phenomenology of the urban planning, and the design like phenomenology of the architecture. Therefore entire families of signs and meanings, of semiotic praxis and of methodologies, appear and disappear depending on the reading the equilibrium relation subject-object within the historical and social dynamism.
The properties, than in the world of modernity were believed made part of the things, are in fact revealed to be property of the observer, the subjectivity has assumed today an enormous value.
Design today is taking care of the immense kaleidoscope of the differences and of the person in a direct way, but for who attempts to design giving answers to new needs, the aspect able to make the difference is for us to understand if the person, in last analisys, must be perceived as unlinked from every hypothesis of community, as the world of the technologies and the more aggressive marketing leave to mean, or not.
"To celebrate the unfinished in this was of digital ubiquity is to laud process rather than goal - to open up to third thing that is not to resolution, but rather to been of suspension.... The question becomes how to categorize such to fast-moving set of objects and concepts." (3) On the other hand if design will express a culture able to follow its user-mutant, offering meaning coordinates, able to tie the Sensitive to the Intelligible offering indications of a reasonable community, the design can accomplish a remarkable path in the history.
"As relevant not only to the centered human but also to the decentered human as pertinent the human heart, body, and spirit as well as the human mind". (4)
If the model of modernity has created several rests from conceptual level to urban and social level, the model emerged in postmodernity appears quite founded on the production of rests, in the sense that gives life to continuous chaotic processes, to generate the continuous physical and mental "peripheries", continuous marginalities and differences, entrusting to the exclusive presence of the new media, the possibility to weld the sense of all.
Of course we assume the travel of the contemporary subject in the urban drifting, of the metropolis and in the digital networks, as basic condition in which it lives, but we ask which can be the praxis of creation of an "itself" within such extreme subjectivity, intentional, tried or found.
In the post-modern de-fragmented imagination, the expression of an "itself" speaking "about itself" to the mirror, activates too often a labyrinthic circuit of pure images. To the contrary, in the effort of production of an "imaginary" ( so, more then images ) lies the expression of an "itself" who have the problem to give itself an address, and therefore to free render an access able to transform the inner world, the own memory, in a "system". This map of reconstruction of "itself", becomes "storytelling", and the intelligible aspect becomes the other pole of the inner dialectic, that removes the subject from the a-prospective dimension as a chaos, and puts it in the a-prospective dimension as a plan.

From the form to the process, from the object to the nets,
the metaphors we need

It's undeniable as for centuries the perspective condition has focused in the "Figure" as core of the own metanarrations. This figure, in the fast and dynamic circuit of the industry, has already begun in the XIX century to endure a process of fragmentation whose apex is emerged in an excessive unifing and homologating praxis as it have been guided from the razionalist movement.
The rationalism movement has accepted with much courage the challenge with the serial world of the industry, creating practically from zero a new dictionary through the linguistic synthesis of the abstractism, also because inclusive of a principle of universal abstraction, inborn in conceptual geography of the human culture.
In the fulfillment of this transition, towards the post-industrial society, we can see evidently the conceptual exodus that from the world of the figures it proceeds towards the world of the processes. This lead design to take conscience about a kind of "jump of scale" made by the digital era going fast towards a probabilistic scheme of generative possibilities, through the "world of the shapes" coming from the consolidated morphogenesis. This phenomenon happens by considering the complexity in which we live, and for the speed in which such complexity appears. A challenge and a fantastic opportunity to understand one essential and escaping issue, is where the level of the coherence of the sense shifted, or where the speech has been moved, where to trace the equilibrium point that alloy the sensitive data to the intelligible one. Therefore not only the tangible data from the senses but also the hypothetical data: in other words to try, and to produce, traces of meant in one unstable and complex geography.

Desappearing Time remodellation of the space

"To the time-matter of the hard geophysical truth of the Places modification succeeds the Time then Light of a virtual truth that even the truth of every duration, causing therefore, with the Incident of the time, the acceleration of every truth of the things of the beings of the socioculturali phenomena" (5) This difficult cohabitation between material and immaterial world produce a rising effect of permanent pre-semiotic chaos created between who must "guide" the narrations in the insediative landscape, between the material languages and the immaterial processes of the new communication and the new media. Peter Lunenfeld as an example, emphasizes with much severity
the more frequent misunderstanding of the dominant culture of the communication: making to coincide data with information. The project's culture aims in our opinion, just in stopping itself on such "misunderstandings", just in the moment in which the protocols software they do not succeed to read the "World of the signs" that they produce and distribute, but that the world of the marketing succeeds to impose like new collective lessic, available into the immaterial catalogue.
It appear just because it redistributes them downgraded from sign to marks. It is also a paradox because computer since has essentially taken care to transfer a language in an other language.
This limited availability or structural accessibility show itself today not without a certain visibility; since the modern linear world, the so-called "universe of the precision" still maintains a concrete possibility to be managed in effective way also into not linear system or vision, since no process is completed in the history in virtue of its exclusive autoreferential but just for proceeding in interdependent way, "chaotic" way, as described by the catastrophes theory.
In the interactive development of a project, the cognitive dynamics defines always a code that contains rules and behaviors that trace a project not special finalized plan but the possible path of its evolution. In this point we don't find a controlled event, but an idea of "eventual" creativity where a direct intection process is replaced by an other process whose central issue is to avoid the control. The design act trace the transformation and not the shape because every shape, in this point of view, its only one of the possible parallels result of the idea. In this process the ideas are transformed via software in systems of rules. Considering the evolution of the computing possibilities, today we know as very simple rules much can generate much more complexes results. So the more sincere meaning of the delinearization appear as a process that produce ideas, and not de-idealized procedures.
The digital world make available and unique language to rapresent information of differend kind and nature, in a brand new integration among code and languages which were used to consider far. This distance is the focus point in which the perception of the methodologies is played also to bury or to resuscitare to second of the situations. One of the contradictions of modernity consists in fact also in the inability to resolve wave by wave the problems of the previous contraddiction, giving life to a theatre of aesthetic and political social events that,today need often a morphology structure based on a replication of the word. Perhaps today it would be right to not only speak about "past" but about "past-past" and consequently, "future-future". The simultaneous presence of the nanotecnologies and the water lack in the planet for million human persons is in some way an image that renders the idea.
It's here, in these environment made of "past-past" and "future-future", than the project of industrial design, but the architecture has a destiny much similar one, tries its paths, since the immaterial civilizzation paradoxicalally creates a continuous amount of waste, to its edges, demanding a successive plan to the scale of the problems. Probably today the problem is to rebuild up the existent edges and, it's important not specially in the Euclidean sense, indeed often and gladly in topologic sense.

The rule of Metaproject design

Metaproject design plays in this scene an important role because it reopens, reactivating the world of the imaginary, exactly what the linear numerical dimension of the modern had closed, but at same time joining what the postmodern deregulated dimension of the chaos leaves free at the molecular state; into a perennial state of transformations without shape, information without contents, contents without meanings. Losing the interest to the metaphors we lose an important instrument to give hypotheses, even fragmentary, of collectivity and community.
Metaproject design, working on the world of the metafunctions, opens an important creative space to the world of the "word", to the complex "dictionary" of meaning non reductables to the biunivoc interpretations, who this take with himself, working exactly on the implicit diagonality existent inside the concepts. The philosophical backstage reaches comes opportunely, from the reflections on the strategies of the knowledge and the narrations of the decostructionist philosophy of french philosophers Derrida and Deleuze, and in Isia they are inquired from many years, and that we would want to combine to the sistemic thinking about which we spoke to the beginning.
Regarding the well structured praxis observed in the present of the neo-Moebius morphology,
As example in the Theory of the Catastrophes, the conceptual approach, including the opening fields lanced by a free and symbolic links created by the poetry or literacy or painting, indicates a real issue to re-joint, and heating, the affective tie between the figure, and the net, the abstraction and the materic world, the concept and the sign, the technology and the problem to resolve.
The metaproject strategy adopted in Isia of Rome since many years tries to include in its transdiscilinary laboratory something speaking about the "story of the sites and the things".
Starting from traces and leaving traces, starting from the semantically closed art-work of modernity, and to proceede in to defragmentate, something able to let us to wander on, using the literature, poetry, architecture, anthropology, film. The aim is just to put us in a situation of hearing and dyaloge with these praxis, and not to leave alone the morphologic searches on one side and conceptual expression from the other, to manage an enormous problem, projectual and logic or estetic, in which they are absolutely not equipped to answer.

Metafunzioni to offer to see to carry to contain to distribute to
Concepts       measure density speed transparency crowd solitudine.
Situations      Edges folds regions borders center the periphery margins.
Relations       Within outside under over in means.
Sintassi         Study of morphogenetic materials, morphologic strategies.
Tipologie      Tunnel passage door room public square corridor.
Geographies Nets frames structures trees gulfs bays.
Maps             levels of communication between signs and situations space them.
Interaction    cognitive Behaviors, patterns, models you, usabilità, control, technology.

We would to signal like the definition of non-site, (5) by now famous in the sociology and anthropology literacy, unfortunately today is stretching to a more large landscape of situations, and giving to this one more extensive and genuine interpretation. The non-sites are sites absent from spatial meaning or typologic work, therefore they felt of story-tell, the "work of the sign" is absent.
it doesn't regard only the great centers trades them since the landscapes whitouth identity the of postmodernity, and they are are much more numerous than what we believe.
Also the kitch entrance hall of the luxury five stars hotel is a non-site, the Eiffel Tower is non-site, even if in this case we have an is intelligent non-site, many stations and airports it are, many periphery in Italy it is. Like the dressed one of Smith, the program against the elect Neo, also Smith is non-site, while the proto-industrial engine of the city basement of Zaion are a site, dramatically suffering, but site.

Folders, edges, elements and nodes

Without shape not there is information, useless to remove this topic, the future will be the era of the shape, but it will not be the perfect shape coming from the history of the shapes, as well as from the morphogenesis that we well know. The ability to figurative abstraction will have to focus on flows, processes and contaminations in intellectually and morphologically cultured way. Even media are in continuous evolution, contrarily to our human abilities, the redefinition of the meaning giving value in the space, are based exclusively on our human characteristic to understand the complex relations between "objects" and ideas.
The contemporary cities are not simply an immense one agglomerated of spaces waiting for solutions, but above all an immense superposition of nets and systems, an interlaced one of material and immaterial relations, such a variety of bounden bifurcations into the massive social economic processes taking today the name, by now mythical, of Globalization.

On one hand the city combines, decomposes and recomposes, the new multitudes to delivery to impressive building configurations, from the other hand, cause the speed with which the digital economy moves, the human environment creates continuous systemic emergencies, generating at its edges. Considering the permanent critical mass generated to its edges and that the Media resetting, in real time, in the midst, or center, or to the contrary, if it is preferred, dissolving the center concept.
New geography of the knowledge is taking care today about the urban "drift" under the topologic profile, in other words under the profile of the sustainables relational qualities into the its inner one. The conceptual passages through topologic regions, borders, reveal a very interesting field of acting, because they express those "jumps of scale" and those "cross of edge" so important in the processes of urban liveability.
A deeper vision of the complexity and the speed with which the borders them constitutes in the space, make appear to their inner one folds and corrugations, in which it's possible to backtrack the peculiar work of the sign due also to the any aleatory praxis, subjective and temporary, as a telephone booth or graffito, but all participate to the drawing up moment for moment the Hypertext, about which it was spoken to the beginning.
The interaction project, as an example. studies like acting within this instability without to interfere with the deep inner messages, but also without too much kindlyness or goodwill towards the instinctive and not communicative treatment dragged behind, and that now becomes residual. Making oneself as promoter of a expressive and logical continuum, the design that interests to us can activate just that "incomplete scenario" on which we can porsue to write again.

Notes
(1) Zigmunt Baumann "Interview on the identity"
(2) Zigmunt Baumann "Liquid Modernity"
(3) Peter Lunenfeld "The digital Dialectic" The Mit Press, 2000 page.8
(4) Robert Jacobson "Information Design" The Mit Press 1999 page 43
(5) Paul Virilio "the computer science bomb" Raffaello Curtain and. 2000 page 110
(6) Marc Augé "Non-sites" Laterza publisher 2003

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