Here is a simple idea. Try to write a book about design, and you will end up doing either of two things: a book about some aspects of the history of design, or a manifesto calling for more design into the environment you live in. There is another option, though, one that starts from a fairly straightforward factual observation. We not need to call for yet more design to be injected in our lives, because design is alread literally everywhere. Most of what surrounds you in the artificial world is the result of some design process. Design, in our society, is diffuse. It permeates many if not all aspects of our lives, from the way desktops are built to the way voting systems are designed. So the simple idea we want to start from is to look around and pay a bit more attention to what a designed world looks like. A design watch: a practice we train ourselves and our students to perform. This is what we did over the last years in a lean project called Mangrovia Design Collective. Documenting design as it affects our lives, organizing a database, posting some of our findings on the web. Then cycling from here, proposing interventions in a very peculiar academic setting, and watching again the results.

There is, of course, a certain random flavor to this activity, as it is driven our personal encounters with the designed world. However, scenes that made it to this book are collected with some systematicity.

We need to observe more our surroundings. This is a refrain of much recent books that praise going back to observing the natural environment. Mandala book; Casati Lezione del freddo But of course our environment is for most of us a human loaded, artificial environment. It surrounds us, but are we observing it with the care it deserves?

Observation is not a purely perceptive practice. It requires conscious attention, and this is not always availabe; it is actually one of the scarcest and most in demand resources of our mental life. We can adjust our observational practices, however. Attentional pop-up is sensitive to cognitive priming. This means that if you impregnate your mind with a good deal of relevant theoretical concepts, things will come to your eyes. A part of our endeavor is to make sure the theoretical concepts are available, and this is the purpose of the next part of this notebook. So let’s start from what the theory we rely upon (that makes us make the observations we do make) looks like.