Architectural Spaces and Values of Design

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Research Projects

1. 

Designer’s Social Responsibility

This project addresses the design challenges regarding planning and involvement with the entire social structure. The focus is on constructing knowledge, identifying problems, and searching for solutions as primary factors of the designer’s social responsibility focused on the ethical values of sustainable development. Accordingly, this approach is outlined in the following parts. The first refers to the historical background of the early impacts of the technological revolution on urban life and, consequently, on the values of a “romantic nature” in opposition to industrial development. In this respect, the bases for a worldview and utopias concerning a “back to nature” sense are presented with origins in European Romanticism. Second, the environmental scenario of sustainability is analyzed in its economic dimension, focusing on the social context of the emerging political agenda as the main challenge for corporations in the 21st century, which respectively concerns the challenges of architecture, design, and urban planning. Finally, this research project discusses sustainable development goals in terms of their complexity and the responsibilities in design and architecture, especially for urban design, in planning for long-term purposes. The conclusion of this project is sought through qualitative research, verifying the need for planning based on ethical and aesthetic aspects of public policies for urbanization solutions.

2. 

Communication Design:
Reducing Visual Pollution Toward a Smart City

The urban visual communication system is believed to have its language and codes, such as a signaling system as an international language in public spaces in large cities, due to an empirical development process focused on functionality rather than aesthetics. This research project focuses on exploring how communication design can be used to connect physical and virtual spaces to create a smart city. In this way, it has become increasingly necessary for communication design focused on media in urban spaces to solve visual pollution problems. This project aims to clarify technological development considerations of the communication design involving urban space, with cities’ empirical research moving toward the Fourth Revolution and sustainable development goals. In addition, the focus is on inhabitants’ perceptions of their urban environments and how they orient themselves and behave in the face of everyday experiences. To this end, regarding a smart city’s contemporary goals, this research project methodologically considers qualitative analysis through digital interactions in urban centers by observing the social behavior of inhabitants while applying visual settings. Consequently, this project qualitatively verifies the extension of the virtual world concerning the urban physical space in its implications on metropolitan daily life. This project’s expected results are conditioned to everyone’s functionality through a technicization of the organizational and implementation processes. Finally, design communication has practical significance in daily life in society due to its importance to solutions for communicative and signaling systems, such as moving images in the sense of flow and connectivity.

3.

Visual and Material Culture of Design: The Industry 4.0

Digital technologies stimulate creativity and design projects overcoming obstacles that involve the search for solutions, understanding, knowledge, and, above all, a better human capacity for communication and relationships with environments and artifacts in the urban context. However, the actual stand of research results in this field is insufficient to guide design projects through digital technology aiming at sustainable development goals based on functional and ethical design parameters. In such a context, predictions about the quality of life become highly uncertain in the face of technological resources and advances. To state that such a context is positive does not mean legitimate solutions, better human conditions, and better behavior but industry 4.0 interests, that is, the fourth phase of the liberal production and market system, which invests in new projects and developments for the path of humanity and capital’s future sustainability. It is about sociocultural transformations and consequences in the face of technological innovations. Therefore, this research aims to investigate design projects involved in processes of sustainable development goals, industry 4.0 advances, and decision-makers’ interests. To this end, digital presence is approached based on industrial revolutions, highlighting the technological transformations—algorithmic rule, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence—that are directing society toward a significant change regarding the space and time of visual and material experiences. Thus, this research seeks to identify the limits of artificial intelligence’s capacity to solve complex human problems involving design-based learning (DBL): problem, analysis, and resolution. Hence, new attempts during the human-machine learning process are tested to address problems unsolved by artificial intelligence highlighting human values and goodwill in the decisions, choices, and solutions that determine the future of humanity—when and how the decision can be made. The theoretical and methodological approaches are developed to deepen design questions as social phenomena that incorporate meaning and materiality in creative solutions. This is qualitative research focused on design, digital technology, and the creative use of materials, images, and techniques. The emphasis is on collecting descriptive data through direct interaction between the researcher and the object of study—spatial representation, intelligent environments, and artifact mediation between humans and machines, humans and humans, and machines and machines as varied experiences of actions and behaviors of the actors involved.

4.  

Design, Architectural Spaces and Interactive Media 

This research focuses on architectural space’s relationship to the urban environment and social and cultural factors. The aim is to carry out a visual-aesthetic analysis of designing architectural space — virtual and physical. From this point of view, the imitation process (mimesis) is analyzed through values of order and rules in content changes and collective imagery. The expected results are innovative visual narrative forms in contrast to the process of mimicking. This visual research concerns the experiential aspects of images that affect the dichotomy between illusion and reality. For this purpose, a visual analysis is essential based on the symbolic factors of the images and the current context. The focus is on updating the visual narrative amidst the challenges posed by technological convergence as an image model and aesthetic experience, as well as new narrative forms in dynamic image technologies today. In this sense, the dialectic between the natural — understood as the truth and the reality of the perceived things — and the artificial — the representation of what is perceived in the world — is reviewed considering the sociocultural and technological context. The representation of space, the structures, and objects that define this context are considered, including the structure of digital mise en scène guided by the transformation processes of visualization and narrative forms. This complex environment design problem in the face of new forms of communication is empirically verified through the visual means offered by digital technologies. The results are ultimately shown in terms of overcoming classical geometry in the representation of spatial structures.