The course is intended as a first exploration of our environment of objects: an opportunity to meet, or return, to the horizon of the things we unconsciously frequent through gestures desires and uses.
Design is understood not in a merely technical or specialist sense, but as a practice that has its roots in the human faculty of building-inhabiting the world, and which holds together, inseparably, doing and thinking.
We'll try to offer a global and problematic vision of the design project, to introduce students to the current, living questions of a "discipline" that is seeking for its re-definition, its meaning, within the contradictions of a post-industrial society.

The first phase of the course is aimed at providing the critical tools for a reading of the objects, through the guided analysis of the "already produced". It is articulated as a path by stages which, by stimulating the experimentation of representation tools (writing, drawing, modelling) in both technical and expressive terms, allows the "thing" of design to be progressively penetrated. That is, to thematize "in crescendo":
• the dimension of use, primary, and in any case unreflected
• the aesthetic dimension (perceptual, sensorial, synaesthetic and, ultimately, phenomenological approach)
The study of the form and the motifs that internally shape an object (going back to the generative matrices - fluid, always manipulable - in a logic close to "figuration" according to P. Klee)
• the constructive, structural reasons that guarantee the product's internal coherence (literally: the "being together" of the components)
• the opening or rediscovery of an "imaginal" dimension, in which objects are revealed as significant, emotional, affective nodes: concretions of social and cultural "value", projections of the self that is reflected and found there.

The second phase proposes a sort of "rewriting" of the analyzed object, to propose its meditated, critical, not only external renewal. Through the ways of the meta-project, the redesign, the concept of a new project solution, it aims at developing an individual design project, focused on a cultural, productive, functional reference context. A project that has to be always discussed and justified in the "whys" of the choices and goals it pursues.