From Modernism to Contemporary Design: The Italian Case. A Multimedia Representation of the Flow of Ideas and Relationships Among 152 Designer Chairs

Abstract On June 23, 1972, Emilio Ambasz inaugurated at the MoMa in New York the exhibition, Italy: The new domestic landscape. For some, this event coin-cided with the beginning of that fortunate season of Italian design, which, focusing on quality, specialization and elegance, showed itself to the world, becoming an absolute benchmark. The changed relationship of sharing concepts and experiments, but also the different way of looking at contemporary reality, poses the interesting challenge of imagining and preparing new hybrid forms of multimedia designed to represent the analyzed artefacts through the relationships that exist between them, identifying qualities, characteristics and formal principles. Ultimately, it becomes interesting, through the use of concepts such as superimposition, juxtaposition and contrast, to set up a narrative focused on the representation of the selected 152 chairs in relation to two specific analysis: that of the perceptive skeleton, useful for the representation of currents of thought, and the analysis of the production processes, useful for a comparison between the numerous techniques used in the experimen-tation of innovative materials. The analysis will be carried out trought multimedial and interactive systems of communication.