CLAUDIA DE GIORGI | Politecnico di Torino (original) (raw)
Papers by CLAUDIA DE GIORGI
DIID, Disegno industriale industrial design/DIID, Feb 19, 2024
As part of an increasingly multicultural society issues concerning integration and relationships ... more As part of an increasingly multicultural society issues concerning integration and relationships between ethnic groups and different communities are receiving a great deal of attention in the social and scientific debate. The skills of design can be made available as a tool to systematise this multiplicity, promoting an innovation respectful of diversity, comparison, and interaction between people and cultures. This article concerns practical product design applications, that explore the relationship between multi-cultural society and cultural accessibility. Moreover, this contribution aims to reflect on which and how methodological strategies could be implemented within a design process that focuses on an intercultural approach. A series of case studies of narrative artifacts capable of bringing different cultures together and making them recognizable to different users will be analysed with the lens proposed in the methodological overview.
DIID, Disegno industriale industrial design/DIID, Feb 19, 2024
Women in STEM in Higher Education
The low participation of women in engineering fields is a common problem worldwide. As a result, ... more The low participation of women in engineering fields is a common problem worldwide. As a result, universities are starting to create plans to attract more female students. However, there are no documented methodologies to guide institutions in this process. Hence, this chapter describes a method to attract more women to STEM programs, using one Latin American university as a case study. The procedure starts by establishing a baseline of the student population, using specific metrics to determine possible biases in admissions or graduations. The results show a small number of registered female students; thus, the method suggests different strategies to improve this situation. The next step is proposing activities to empower young girls to study engineering, describing indicators developed to evaluate the effectiveness of the activities. The case study includes participation from elementary, middle, and high school students. Results show that girls and boys participated in the propose...
100 anni dal Bauhaus. Le prospettive della ricerca di design, 2020
Il design riveste oggi un ruolo centrale nell'innesco di pratiche progettuali finalizzate all... more Il design riveste oggi un ruolo centrale nell'innesco di pratiche progettuali finalizzate alla crescita diffusa e sostenibile di attivita collocate in un preciso contesto geografico, ambientale e culturale, in grado di generare meccanismi virtuosi di sviluppo economico e sociale. Il contesto locale costituisce il punto di partenza per il progetto di nuove attivita nonche di valorizzazione di attivita esistenti, e allo stesso tempo e il punto di riferimento per altri ambiti territoriali, vicini e lontani, in termini di replicabilita dell'approccio e delle pratiche. Un continuo confronto che si gioca a livello nazionale e internazionale, a scala "globale", e quindi un lavoro sul campo a livello locale. Obiettivo di questo saggio la messa a fuoco, anche con il supporto di alcuni casi-studio in particolare locali (riferiti cioe al contesto territoriale della regione Piemonte) degli ambiti di intervento e degli strumenti utilizzabili per la creazione di pratiche progett...
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review, 2011
Una delle declinazioni piu attuali del design per i Beni Culturali, vede il progetto quale chiave... more Una delle declinazioni piu attuali del design per i Beni Culturali, vede il progetto quale chiave per la messa in luce dei valori di eccellenze architettoniche e artistiche come dei valori piu diluiti delle testimonianze della cultura materiale del territorio di riferimento. La pubblicazione documenta un'operazione di ricerca e didattica che ha l'ambizione di sposare i due ambiti coniugando gli obiettivi della promozione del circuito delle Residenze Reali dei Savoia con quelli della valorizzazione della tradizione artigiana del territorio piemontese. L'operazione Materialmente nasce con questa duplice vocazione di indagine e si declina quindi in un'esperienza didattica che vede artigiani e studenti lavorare fianco a fianco e proporre, con i materiali e i modi della tradizione, nuovi prodotti e nuove possibilita non scontate di fruire, promuovere e "gustare" le Residenze Reali piemontesi. Claudia De Giorgi e l'autore del capitolo: "La nuova formazione del designer: dal disegno industriale al design, anche per l'artigianato" pp 10-19. Claudio Germak e l'autore del capitolo "Design e artigianato" pp- 20-33. Marco Bozzola e l'autore del capitolo "Il merchandising museale: la valorizzazione dei beni culturali tra artigianato e design" pp. 34-43. Marco Bozzola, Claudia De Giorgi, Claudio Germak sono gli autori del capitolo "Materialmente. A casa con un pezzo di storia, cultura materiale e design" pp. 44-105
Applied Acoustics, 2017
Semantic differentials are frequently used to investigate sounds from a subjective point of view.... more Semantic differentials are frequently used to investigate sounds from a subjective point of view. The application of semantic differentials to the case of the rolling sound of office chairs is dealt with in this study. After a preliminary selection of the semantic differentials by fifty-two participants, another ninety participants took part in a listening test and described the acoustic stimuli of two office chairs, of high and low quality, respectively, rolling over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), ceramic and wood floorings, under context and laboratory test conditions. Under laboratory condition, recorded real stimuli were presented to the listeners via headphones, or under SounBe condition. SounBe is a new tool that has recently been conceived to explore sound at an early design stage. With this method, interactions between a chair and the floor are simplified, a mechanical sound is produced of a wheel moving across a flooring tile, and the recorded stimuli are then presented to the listeners through headphones. Four 7-point Likert scale semantic differentials, related to calmness, roughness, pleasantness and annoyance, were used to collect subjective data. Objective data were instead obtained from psychoacoustic indexes. Factors such as gender and weight were found to have no effect on the subjective and objective data. The flooring factor instead resulted to have much more influence than the chair factor. No statistically significant difference was observed between the test conditions on the semantic differential scales, thus proving the compatibility between SounBe and real sounds.
Today, design implies not only compliance with product technical-functional requirements but also... more Today, design implies not only compliance with product technical-functional requirements but also with increasingly broader cultural demands concerning humans and the environment: respectively sensory attributes and environmental requirements. The various disciplines involved have recently made considerable progress, by developing tools and methods that, interconnected and also with the development of neurosciences, are able to furnish increasingly realistic, scientific and objective explanations as to how we perceive the world. The paper presents an innovative approach, the ICS (Innovation, Comprehension, Sustainability) method and the correlated tools, which in some case have been patented by the Politecnico di Torino research group. In this way, by adopting the ICS method, the theoretical and scientific innovations should be translated into strategic instruments dedicated to large, small and medium enterprises. Moreover, use of the ICS method is illustrated by presenting two case...
According to the most advanced orientation of design culture, the choice of the materials suitabl... more According to the most advanced orientation of design culture, the choice of the materials suitable for a given project should be dealt with in the metaplanning phase, which is thus extended and charged with meaning: in this way, the materials have a recognised weight in the project, they support the technical functions and at the same time they create its personality. In the ongoing process of innovation in the field of materials and products, where the expressive-sensorial properties are increasingly underlined, the evaluation on how the man take into consideration this new dimensions, linked to the material and product perception, having acquired growing importance. On these assumptions the paper deals with a research carried out by MATto research group (Politecnico di Torino), where the innovative adoption of non-verbal methodologies and equipment, such as the eye-tracking machine have been experimented in order to take into account this new dimension linked to the human unconsciousness perception during the design process of an industrial product. Eye-tracking offers important elements regarding the capacity of the product/interface to attract/hold or to rebuff the attention of the observer: it is based on the registration of what a subject observes or ignores, when deciding to take into consideration a given product. Specifically these experimentations of using eye-tracking into the design process, have been arranged on several levels of analysis coincident with different objects of the study: material, semi-finished products, real and virtual prototypes and the finished product. The experimentation results collected so far are illustrated in this paper
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2015
The economic crisis that has hit countries in the west in recent years has generated a decline in... more The economic crisis that has hit countries in the west in recent years has generated a decline in the presence and the strength of the entrepreneurial class and also of its traditional role of "customer" of the design sector. Design has recently responded to this new situation by generating new working methods. Politecnico di Torino has evolved its classic demanding approach to design and brought it up to date by incorporating "explorative" capacities into the training of its students, providing them with the necessary skills to cope with an absence of market, proposing the designer as a key fi gure capable of exploring existing situations and off ering new solutions. The aim of this paper is to show how, in the absence of market, the strategies that Exploring Design can implement generate system-product, process, service design projects that are always original and innovative, capable of leading quite easily to new methods, business ideas and spheres of activity in which customers can become involved later on.
The third mission of academia, i.e. public engagement, has become more and more explicit. Nowaday... more The third mission of academia, i.e. public engagement, has become more and more explicit. Nowadays universities have to engage with societal needs and market demands by linking the university's activity with its own socioeconomic and cultural context. In this perspective, this paper will deal with the educational activities of academia through the activities of a material library: the spread of recent and continuous innovations of materials for design. In the landscape of academic material libraries, the case study of MATto appears as of particular interest, especially concerning the topic of the continuous updating proposed to its contacts, therefore it will be investigated and explored. A new strategy, whose main objectives are generating widespread learning based on a continuous dialogue, nurturing a polytechnic knowledge on materials through ongoing updating and involving the wide public into informative processes by generating curiosity and interest on the research on materials for production, was designed ad hoc. The most interesting and effective tools in relation to the attended results were selected and the working methods are based on a series of informal live-meetings and a new media presence growth action plan. After one year, the results of this new approach to public engagement are still embryonic but yet promising. This work can be an example for other institutions facing issues such as contemporary methods to teach or, at least, to spread materials and design culture.
research approach to design without a market1 Questões avançadas de design: uma abordagem estraté... more research approach to design without a market1 Questões avançadas de design: uma abordagem estratégica e investigativa para projetos sem mercado
Frontiers of Sound in Design
Everyone is plugged into an intangible world made of sounds, characterised by communicative and u... more Everyone is plugged into an intangible world made of sounds, characterised by communicative and uncommunicative, pleasing and unpleasing, useful and sometimes useless sound stimuli, theorised in the 60s by the Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer as “soundscape”. The soundscape is composed of sounds with very different aims: feedback sounds, mechanical sounds, digital sounds, etc. The ever-increasing interest in the soundscape is proven by the latest studies on sounds and noise in different living contexts, carried out by international research groups all over the world: in workspaces, for example, environmental sounds, and especially continuous sounds, seem to affect employee cognitive performances, stress levels, results achieved and overall wellbeing. Nevertheless, despite the main focus having been on continuous sounds such as traffic noise, ventilation plant noise, chatting, etc., for several years, nowadays research is investigating the importance of discontinuous sounds, i.e. everyday object sounds. This introductory chapter intends to outline the state of the art on the most recent researches into sound in design, from national and international conferences to international research projects, to shows and exhibitions and to business. The opportunity of designing the sounds produced by everyday objects and generating a better soundscape in which we all live, will be the main goal analysed in this introductory chapter. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach of investigation into the new frontiers of sound in design is disclosed here.
Cura scientifica della mostra (con Claudio Germak), progetto allestimenti (con Studio De Ferrari ... more Cura scientifica della mostra (con Claudio Germak), progetto allestimenti (con Studio De Ferrari Architetti), cura catalogo edizione 2008. La ricerca MURST Sistema Design Italia ha costituito occasione per la costituzione di un Osservatorio Permanente sul sistema design territoriale (regione Piemonte). Le azioni dell'Osservatorio possono essere cosi sintetizzate: - aggiornamento fisico della mostra PIEMONTE TORINO DESIGN attraverso la raccolta di nuovi prodotti progettati e/o prodotti nell'ambito del territorio regionale. I prodotti, oltre a costituire il materiale documentario dell'esposizione itinerante, sono archiviati come COLLEZIONE PIEMONTE TORINO DESIGN per la quale e prevista una sede fisica permanente nel futuro Design Center nelle aree di FIAT Mirafiori; - aggiornamento virtuale della COLLEZIONE PIEMONTE TORINO DESIGN attraverso la cura del sito www.piemontetorinodesign.it, creato a documentazione delle attivita dell'Osservatorio; - programmazione e attuazi...
DIID, Disegno industriale industrial design/DIID, Feb 19, 2024
As part of an increasingly multicultural society issues concerning integration and relationships ... more As part of an increasingly multicultural society issues concerning integration and relationships between ethnic groups and different communities are receiving a great deal of attention in the social and scientific debate. The skills of design can be made available as a tool to systematise this multiplicity, promoting an innovation respectful of diversity, comparison, and interaction between people and cultures. This article concerns practical product design applications, that explore the relationship between multi-cultural society and cultural accessibility. Moreover, this contribution aims to reflect on which and how methodological strategies could be implemented within a design process that focuses on an intercultural approach. A series of case studies of narrative artifacts capable of bringing different cultures together and making them recognizable to different users will be analysed with the lens proposed in the methodological overview.
DIID, Disegno industriale industrial design/DIID, Feb 19, 2024
Women in STEM in Higher Education
The low participation of women in engineering fields is a common problem worldwide. As a result, ... more The low participation of women in engineering fields is a common problem worldwide. As a result, universities are starting to create plans to attract more female students. However, there are no documented methodologies to guide institutions in this process. Hence, this chapter describes a method to attract more women to STEM programs, using one Latin American university as a case study. The procedure starts by establishing a baseline of the student population, using specific metrics to determine possible biases in admissions or graduations. The results show a small number of registered female students; thus, the method suggests different strategies to improve this situation. The next step is proposing activities to empower young girls to study engineering, describing indicators developed to evaluate the effectiveness of the activities. The case study includes participation from elementary, middle, and high school students. Results show that girls and boys participated in the propose...
100 anni dal Bauhaus. Le prospettive della ricerca di design, 2020
Il design riveste oggi un ruolo centrale nell'innesco di pratiche progettuali finalizzate all... more Il design riveste oggi un ruolo centrale nell'innesco di pratiche progettuali finalizzate alla crescita diffusa e sostenibile di attivita collocate in un preciso contesto geografico, ambientale e culturale, in grado di generare meccanismi virtuosi di sviluppo economico e sociale. Il contesto locale costituisce il punto di partenza per il progetto di nuove attivita nonche di valorizzazione di attivita esistenti, e allo stesso tempo e il punto di riferimento per altri ambiti territoriali, vicini e lontani, in termini di replicabilita dell'approccio e delle pratiche. Un continuo confronto che si gioca a livello nazionale e internazionale, a scala "globale", e quindi un lavoro sul campo a livello locale. Obiettivo di questo saggio la messa a fuoco, anche con il supporto di alcuni casi-studio in particolare locali (riferiti cioe al contesto territoriale della regione Piemonte) degli ambiti di intervento e degli strumenti utilizzabili per la creazione di pratiche progett...
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review, 2011
Una delle declinazioni piu attuali del design per i Beni Culturali, vede il progetto quale chiave... more Una delle declinazioni piu attuali del design per i Beni Culturali, vede il progetto quale chiave per la messa in luce dei valori di eccellenze architettoniche e artistiche come dei valori piu diluiti delle testimonianze della cultura materiale del territorio di riferimento. La pubblicazione documenta un'operazione di ricerca e didattica che ha l'ambizione di sposare i due ambiti coniugando gli obiettivi della promozione del circuito delle Residenze Reali dei Savoia con quelli della valorizzazione della tradizione artigiana del territorio piemontese. L'operazione Materialmente nasce con questa duplice vocazione di indagine e si declina quindi in un'esperienza didattica che vede artigiani e studenti lavorare fianco a fianco e proporre, con i materiali e i modi della tradizione, nuovi prodotti e nuove possibilita non scontate di fruire, promuovere e "gustare" le Residenze Reali piemontesi. Claudia De Giorgi e l'autore del capitolo: "La nuova formazione del designer: dal disegno industriale al design, anche per l'artigianato" pp 10-19. Claudio Germak e l'autore del capitolo "Design e artigianato" pp- 20-33. Marco Bozzola e l'autore del capitolo "Il merchandising museale: la valorizzazione dei beni culturali tra artigianato e design" pp. 34-43. Marco Bozzola, Claudia De Giorgi, Claudio Germak sono gli autori del capitolo "Materialmente. A casa con un pezzo di storia, cultura materiale e design" pp. 44-105
Applied Acoustics, 2017
Semantic differentials are frequently used to investigate sounds from a subjective point of view.... more Semantic differentials are frequently used to investigate sounds from a subjective point of view. The application of semantic differentials to the case of the rolling sound of office chairs is dealt with in this study. After a preliminary selection of the semantic differentials by fifty-two participants, another ninety participants took part in a listening test and described the acoustic stimuli of two office chairs, of high and low quality, respectively, rolling over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), ceramic and wood floorings, under context and laboratory test conditions. Under laboratory condition, recorded real stimuli were presented to the listeners via headphones, or under SounBe condition. SounBe is a new tool that has recently been conceived to explore sound at an early design stage. With this method, interactions between a chair and the floor are simplified, a mechanical sound is produced of a wheel moving across a flooring tile, and the recorded stimuli are then presented to the listeners through headphones. Four 7-point Likert scale semantic differentials, related to calmness, roughness, pleasantness and annoyance, were used to collect subjective data. Objective data were instead obtained from psychoacoustic indexes. Factors such as gender and weight were found to have no effect on the subjective and objective data. The flooring factor instead resulted to have much more influence than the chair factor. No statistically significant difference was observed between the test conditions on the semantic differential scales, thus proving the compatibility between SounBe and real sounds.
Today, design implies not only compliance with product technical-functional requirements but also... more Today, design implies not only compliance with product technical-functional requirements but also with increasingly broader cultural demands concerning humans and the environment: respectively sensory attributes and environmental requirements. The various disciplines involved have recently made considerable progress, by developing tools and methods that, interconnected and also with the development of neurosciences, are able to furnish increasingly realistic, scientific and objective explanations as to how we perceive the world. The paper presents an innovative approach, the ICS (Innovation, Comprehension, Sustainability) method and the correlated tools, which in some case have been patented by the Politecnico di Torino research group. In this way, by adopting the ICS method, the theoretical and scientific innovations should be translated into strategic instruments dedicated to large, small and medium enterprises. Moreover, use of the ICS method is illustrated by presenting two case...
According to the most advanced orientation of design culture, the choice of the materials suitabl... more According to the most advanced orientation of design culture, the choice of the materials suitable for a given project should be dealt with in the metaplanning phase, which is thus extended and charged with meaning: in this way, the materials have a recognised weight in the project, they support the technical functions and at the same time they create its personality. In the ongoing process of innovation in the field of materials and products, where the expressive-sensorial properties are increasingly underlined, the evaluation on how the man take into consideration this new dimensions, linked to the material and product perception, having acquired growing importance. On these assumptions the paper deals with a research carried out by MATto research group (Politecnico di Torino), where the innovative adoption of non-verbal methodologies and equipment, such as the eye-tracking machine have been experimented in order to take into account this new dimension linked to the human unconsciousness perception during the design process of an industrial product. Eye-tracking offers important elements regarding the capacity of the product/interface to attract/hold or to rebuff the attention of the observer: it is based on the registration of what a subject observes or ignores, when deciding to take into consideration a given product. Specifically these experimentations of using eye-tracking into the design process, have been arranged on several levels of analysis coincident with different objects of the study: material, semi-finished products, real and virtual prototypes and the finished product. The experimentation results collected so far are illustrated in this paper
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2015
The economic crisis that has hit countries in the west in recent years has generated a decline in... more The economic crisis that has hit countries in the west in recent years has generated a decline in the presence and the strength of the entrepreneurial class and also of its traditional role of "customer" of the design sector. Design has recently responded to this new situation by generating new working methods. Politecnico di Torino has evolved its classic demanding approach to design and brought it up to date by incorporating "explorative" capacities into the training of its students, providing them with the necessary skills to cope with an absence of market, proposing the designer as a key fi gure capable of exploring existing situations and off ering new solutions. The aim of this paper is to show how, in the absence of market, the strategies that Exploring Design can implement generate system-product, process, service design projects that are always original and innovative, capable of leading quite easily to new methods, business ideas and spheres of activity in which customers can become involved later on.
The third mission of academia, i.e. public engagement, has become more and more explicit. Nowaday... more The third mission of academia, i.e. public engagement, has become more and more explicit. Nowadays universities have to engage with societal needs and market demands by linking the university's activity with its own socioeconomic and cultural context. In this perspective, this paper will deal with the educational activities of academia through the activities of a material library: the spread of recent and continuous innovations of materials for design. In the landscape of academic material libraries, the case study of MATto appears as of particular interest, especially concerning the topic of the continuous updating proposed to its contacts, therefore it will be investigated and explored. A new strategy, whose main objectives are generating widespread learning based on a continuous dialogue, nurturing a polytechnic knowledge on materials through ongoing updating and involving the wide public into informative processes by generating curiosity and interest on the research on materials for production, was designed ad hoc. The most interesting and effective tools in relation to the attended results were selected and the working methods are based on a series of informal live-meetings and a new media presence growth action plan. After one year, the results of this new approach to public engagement are still embryonic but yet promising. This work can be an example for other institutions facing issues such as contemporary methods to teach or, at least, to spread materials and design culture.
research approach to design without a market1 Questões avançadas de design: uma abordagem estraté... more research approach to design without a market1 Questões avançadas de design: uma abordagem estratégica e investigativa para projetos sem mercado
Frontiers of Sound in Design
Everyone is plugged into an intangible world made of sounds, characterised by communicative and u... more Everyone is plugged into an intangible world made of sounds, characterised by communicative and uncommunicative, pleasing and unpleasing, useful and sometimes useless sound stimuli, theorised in the 60s by the Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer as “soundscape”. The soundscape is composed of sounds with very different aims: feedback sounds, mechanical sounds, digital sounds, etc. The ever-increasing interest in the soundscape is proven by the latest studies on sounds and noise in different living contexts, carried out by international research groups all over the world: in workspaces, for example, environmental sounds, and especially continuous sounds, seem to affect employee cognitive performances, stress levels, results achieved and overall wellbeing. Nevertheless, despite the main focus having been on continuous sounds such as traffic noise, ventilation plant noise, chatting, etc., for several years, nowadays research is investigating the importance of discontinuous sounds, i.e. everyday object sounds. This introductory chapter intends to outline the state of the art on the most recent researches into sound in design, from national and international conferences to international research projects, to shows and exhibitions and to business. The opportunity of designing the sounds produced by everyday objects and generating a better soundscape in which we all live, will be the main goal analysed in this introductory chapter. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach of investigation into the new frontiers of sound in design is disclosed here.
Cura scientifica della mostra (con Claudio Germak), progetto allestimenti (con Studio De Ferrari ... more Cura scientifica della mostra (con Claudio Germak), progetto allestimenti (con Studio De Ferrari Architetti), cura catalogo edizione 2008. La ricerca MURST Sistema Design Italia ha costituito occasione per la costituzione di un Osservatorio Permanente sul sistema design territoriale (regione Piemonte). Le azioni dell'Osservatorio possono essere cosi sintetizzate: - aggiornamento fisico della mostra PIEMONTE TORINO DESIGN attraverso la raccolta di nuovi prodotti progettati e/o prodotti nell'ambito del territorio regionale. I prodotti, oltre a costituire il materiale documentario dell'esposizione itinerante, sono archiviati come COLLEZIONE PIEMONTE TORINO DESIGN per la quale e prevista una sede fisica permanente nel futuro Design Center nelle aree di FIAT Mirafiori; - aggiornamento virtuale della COLLEZIONE PIEMONTE TORINO DESIGN attraverso la cura del sito www.piemontetorinodesign.it, creato a documentazione delle attivita dell'Osservatorio; - programmazione e attuazi...