Design Plus Research: proceedings of the Politecnico di Milano conference

Convegno internazionale, svolto al Politecnico di Milano, il 18-20 Maggio 2000. The Milano conference "Design Plus Research" was held from 18 to 20 May, 2000, at Politecnico di Milano. It brought scholars and researchers from more than twenty countries to meet at the campus of Politecnico to establish a ground for a culture of research in industrial design. Beside the declared intention of offering a milieu of expression to this emergent dimension, as a parallel concern, the initiative was ideally sustained by the need to recognize and to nurture a research community, thus following the path indicated by a number of conferences that already marked the end of an era of separations in the culture of design. The symposium was promoted and organized by the Ph. Doctorate in Industrial Design at Politecnico di Milano.This included the staff formed by the Ph.D. candidates of the program in Industrial Design, where not only the idea of the conference was conceived and its program elaborated, but where all the aspects of the initiative were developed, from the conference proceedings , to its visual communication and logistics. Prof. Tomas Maldonado and Prof. Ezio Manzini of Politecnico di Milano and Prof. Victor Margolin of Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, were the active members of the scientific committee. The organizing committee for the symposium was chaired by Prof. Silvia Pizzocaro, member of the Board of professors of the Ph.D. in Industrial Design. The result of the symposium was an international debate of academic level on the reflection about the nature, models and cultures of research as taking shape within the boundaries of the disciplines of industrial design, ranging from product design to visual design up to communication design, even extending to the new areas of design of interfaces and services.