Design and infosphere projects and communicative artifacts in the fourth revolution

Abstract

With the ever-growing dominance of the Information and Comunication Technology (ICT), we have been observing, for many years, the distortion of the entire human experience and of our society, which increasingly depends on intangible goods and services based on information. Interaction with information and technologies distorts the daily experience, also in the individual's life, acting on the profound sense of personal and collective identity. Floridi (2017) calls it a scientific "fourth revolution" (after the Copernican, Darwinian and psychoanalytic ones) and he thinks that it is "creating" a new world dominated by information in which humanity can enter, together with other agents, and in which the separation between the "real" world, offline, and the one opened by ICT, online, is getting smaller and smaller. Within this scenario of digital transition and hybridization, there have been several transformational thrusts in the world, for some years now, driven by an original mix of technological, social and cultural innovation. Many of these belong to the domain of design in its most contemporary and broadest sense, and move on a border territory, certainly transdisciplinary within which the degree of complexity always becomes higher. The transformative process implemented by the increasingly widespread awareness of the collective and relational dimension of the infosphere (Floridi, 2017) therefore opens up new and more challenging scenarios for design and its intrinsic dynamics of change and innovation. On the one hand, "the transformation of digital technologies from commodity to utility, on the other, our living in the two worlds - the real and the virtual (Lanier, 2017) - now collapsed in an osmotic way, impose a new right of citizenship in the contemporary world" (Bollini, 2019-2020, p. 59). In this experiential continuum, we are witnessing the overcoming of the human-centered approach in the direction of a new inclusive dimension of the project that places at the center not only people, but all informational agents (natural and artificial), all protagonists on an equal footing in participatory design processes. The contribution is articulated within a theoretical framework which is followed by some innovative emblematic design experiences that enter into strong correlation with these issues (Floridi, 2017, 2020).