Esperienze digitali di design immersivo. La mano che pensa, il corpo che progetta, le nuove tecnologie che raccontano

In the age of digital transformation, technologies are changing the way we live, work, and design to the point that they catapult us into “another” world, sometimes distant from the physical one we belong to. In a relatively short period of time, designers have gone from exploring their creative thinking through a manual ability to develop ideas with a critical eye to employing increasingly advanced and automated design software; thus, moving from an embodied design experience to a virtual one (2D, 3D, render, AR, VR, XR). Although, on the one hand, this may have negative repercussions on the creative process, on the other, these technologies bridge the communication gap with end users – less prone to the imaginative nature of design and not accustomed to technical languages – making them active from the initial brainstorming stages, thus guaranteeing, unlike the “traditional” process, a design guided by designers but, at the same time, participatory. In this context, however, it seems crucial to keep a critical approach at the center, so that the potential criticalities of such “persuasive” tools do not manifest themselves. The potential of such immersive techniques must, in fact, be valorised as a tool to support the creative process, bridging both the cognitive gap related to the visualization of the project and the distances between the various stakeholders involved in the process. To this end, the paper will present the research experience of the COLUX project. CO-design uses MixedReality for the LUXury interiors sector, which aims, within the Furnishing and Real Estate sector, to develop a service platform and to coordinate the use of AR and VR to improve and streamline the creative process, helping to demonstrate how sharing the designer’s imaginative vision through an immersive technological system has actually met with a positive opinion from the end users. Then, through COLUX and other case studies of national and international interest, the elements that show the limits and opportunities of using immersive technologies in all phases of the creative process are analyzed, in order to obtain a meaningful model and to underline how it is fundamental to catapult both the designer and the end user into an unconventional immersive environment, far from the poor quality digital reproduction that is harmful and disturbing to creativity.