How Natural Are the “Natural” Materials? Proposal for a Quali-Quantitative Measurement Index of Naturalness in the Environmental Sustainability Context

The overall purpose of the paper is overcoming the misunderstanding of the “naturalness” attribute of materials. This is due to the always-increasing innovative materials considered “environmentally sustainable” and “natural” by producers, material libraries, and designers. The investigated research problem is: how to simply and effectively evaluate the degree of naturalness of a material, preventing a complete and complex LCA analysis? The basic design of the study was focused on (i) creating a multicriteria quali-quantitative method—Material Naturalness Index (MNI)— in order to assess materials’ naturalness scientifically, and (ii) test it by running the evaluation on 60 innovative materials. MNI was set considering the least number of parameters of the Material Life Cycle (i.e., resource kingdom, material resource, material processing, post-use processing). The 60 latest materials selected from the “natural” material family of six international material libraries were selected to test the index. The data analysis was based on the Theory of Attractive Quality, considering attractive, must-be, or reverse qualities. Major findings concerning the index utility were found as a result. MNI was demonstrated to support different actors with different aims: (i) designers, in independently evaluating naturalness of materials using real evidence and pursuing a critical point of view not influenced by marketing claims; (ii) producers, in facing the challenge of naturalness; (iii) material libraries, which are collocated between the two other actors, in proposing measurable information concerning naturalness. In conclusion, the study demonstrated how the key-concept of “naturalness” should be assumed as an attribute rather than as a material family

How a Technology Identity Can Enhance the Diffusion of Good Design Practices in Product Sound Design

People are plugged into an intangible sound universe. But only a tiny part of the sounds we are exposed to have been purposefully designed. Recently, designers are bashfully approaching these intangible products’ quality. Product Sound Design represents, in fact, a promising research field still scarcely explored. The design community is answering this concern through new design methods. An Italian university developed a patented method-and-tool, conceived to collect, analyze, and recreate various sounds to develop a new generation of products with designed mechanical (and, eventually, digital) sounds. Spreading this innovation within the design community is fundamental to stimulate future more focused and aware practices. As well as all new technologies, the new patent didn’t have its own identity from the beginning. Extensive work conducted with the scientific approach has therefore been undertaken to redesign its identity to make its disruptiveness intelligible and understandable

La cultura dei materiali e il lato sensoriale del progetto / The material cultures and the sensory side of the project

L’ambito della cultura dei materiali per il design, oggi, si presenta quale disciplina variegata e multiforme: tale contesto, infatti, è studiato attraverso metodi, metodologie e approcci differenti, appartenenti a scienze e saperi spesso anche distanti tra loro, quali discipline delle aree tecnico-scientifiche e discipline umanistiche. I materiali (per il progetto) sono infatti indagati principalmente da due tipi di conoscenze, la prima più tecnica e la seconda più estetico-sensoriale. L’articolo si focalizzerà su quest’ultima, porgendo particolare attenzione ai sensi del tatto, dell’udito e dell’olfatto, quali “strumenti” per il progettista per la progettazione corretta della loro user experience, della percezione, emozione e reazione che una persona prova quando si interfaccia con essi. / Today, the field of the culture of materials for design is a variegated and multi-form discipline: this context, in fact, is investigated through different methods, methodologies and approaches, belonging to sciences and knowledge that are often very distant from each other, such as disciplines of technical-scientific areas and humanities. The materials (for the project) are, in fact, investigated mainly by two types of knowledge, a more technical one and a more aesthetic-sensorial one. The article will focus on the latter, paying particular attention to the senses of touch, hearing and smell, as “tools” for the designer looking for the correct design of their user experience, perception, emotion and reaction when interfacing with them

An Optimal Algorithm for Finding NCA on Pure Pointer Machines

We present a simple, arithmetic-free, efficient scheme to compress trees maintaining the nearest common ancestor (NCA) information. We use this compression scheme to provide an O(n + q lg lg n) solution for solving the NCA problem on Pure Pointer Machines (PPMs) (i.e., pointer machines with no arithmetic capabilities) in both the static and dynamic case, where n is the number of add-leaf/delete operations and q is the number of NCA queries. This solution is optimal

Acqua alta a venezia: Design of a urban scale auditory warning system

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.A new warning system for high tide in Venice has been designed to replace the existing network of electro-mechanical sirens. The project was divided into four sections: (i) optimal placement of loudspeakers via constraint logic programming, (ii) simulation and visualization of the acoustic field in the city, (iii) design of the warning sounds, (iv) validation of the warning sounds. This paper reports the strategies and results of all four project stages, with special emphasis on sound design and validation

Optimal Placement of Acoustic Sources in a Built-up Area using CLP(FD)

In this paper we face the problem of covering a physical area with acoustic signals emitted by different sources, and we present a declarative and effective solution based on Constraint Logic Programming over Finite Domains. After a testing phase on toy examples, we have successfully applied the code to the solution of a real-world placement problem

Acqua Alta a Venezia: Design of a Urban Scale Auditory Warning System

A new warning system for high tide in Venice has been designed to replace the existing network of electro-mechanical sirens. The project was divided into four sections: (i) optimal placement of loudspeakers via constraint logic programming, (ii) simulation and visualization of the acoustic field in the city, (iii) design of the warning sounds, (iv) validation of the warning sounds. This paper reports the strategies and results of all four project stages, with special emphasis on sound design and validation

Designing an Urban-Scale Auditory Alert System

Drawing on a wide range of computing technologies and methodologies, the authors present a new auditory alert system for high tides in Venice designed to replace the existing network of electromechanical sirens