Design Research Group
The Design Research Group (DRG) is a multi-disciplinary research unit that explores the possibilities of design, through technology, science, and creativity.
Main areas of investigations are manufacturing, craft, data and digital design, fashion, spatial analyses, real-time interaction design, visual communication, user experience and the socio-politics of the built environment.
The Group is composed of academics with a strong practice-oriented approach and scholars with a high interest in theory and practice of design. These include junior and senior researchers as well as postgraduate and research students from a variety of disciplines, along with other designers and thinkers with an extensive international and industry network. These areas are combined harmoniously in collaborative research projects. Within the DRG, the synergy operates at all levels, fostering a flexible, dynamic and adaptive approach to design at large.
Technology is evolving at an astonishing speed and it is gradually permeating all aspects of the human experience at both the individual and societal level. Previous paradigms such as the continuous re-negotiation, definition and discovery of notions such as space, objects, place, time, memory and identity, are being gradually replaced by imperatives such as the universality of form and structure, ubiquitous information, discretisation of reality, and self-customisation within mass-production, in an evolving dynamics of complex world organisation.
Design and creativity are in need of a re-conceptualisation within their current and future context. The DRG aims to explore new directions for design to improve people’s live using a combination of the most advanced technologies and the hardwired human facets still present in our lives. Human behaviour, spatial perception through the body, visualisation of hidden patterns, and the complex synergies in the social sphere are enhanced by new ways of manufacturing objects, body parts, design elements, spaces and places.
The DRG aims to blur the boundaries between machine-led technologies and human needs.
Research areas
Our main areas of investigations are:
- manufacturing
- data and digital design
- spatial analyses
- real-time interaction design
- visual communication
- the study of the public sphere.
Get in touch
For more information on our research, please contact Alessio Malizia.