The course explores few fundamental questions between design and material culture. We will investigate the origins and the development of selected aspects of the design practice. The question of Time, will be our main study case: measure instruments, watches and their impact on the material culture, craft, industry, mechanics, design and social aspect of the technological history. The course will explore the role and the modern status of the designer through the mechanization and consumerism processes. We will debate the environmental impact of the industrialization and the alternative and sustainable design approach. We will define some typical connections between objects design technologies and actual interactivity models. The formal and aesthetical aspects of contemporary designers work will conclude the course.

The course will introduce the core ideas that established the field of art since the French Revolution in the late 18th century until present days. We will refer to the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which those ideas and trends grew. During the lessons we will examine a few ideas while presenting a cross-sectional theme that includes major modern works of art, famous artistic currents, and styles, known artists as well as significant texts. The course will begin with a presentation of the era and the popular chronology of art and then we will reveal the various ideas e.g., man versus nature, art and technology, critical art, nihilism in art, formalist art, attraction to another etc.

Death is an event that at the same time belongs to the natural order of things and that stands at the very core of every human culture, insofar as the first burial sites of the homo sapiens can be considered the proof of the existence of social organization. The course follows the development of different approaches towards death in European history from the end of the Roman Empire to contemporary times, through the analysis of textual and iconographic evidence provided by Western literature and arts. History of death since the seminal works by Philippe Aries, Edgar Morin and Michel Foucault in the seventies of last century has become in recent years a field where a complex theoretical discourse has developed, drawing from psychoanalysis as well as from sociology, from anthropology as well as from philosophy. In particular we will deal with the evolution of some tropes and symbols related to death in Western culture in the last two millennia such as the Totentanz, the maiden and the death, the memento mori and others.