Aging and the City – People, Place and Practices
[Final Design Workshop; Proff. Gennaro Postiglione, Giovanni Hanninen, Agim Kercuku; academic year 2021-2022]

The relationship between ethnography and design remains underexplored and is often limited to the production of toolkits or to practices labeled as “architectural ethnography” without critical comparative reflection. This research investigates the generative value of ethnographic representation, hypothesizing that a key moment for designers lies in the transcription phase—graphical, photographic, and textual. Through a series of case studies, it analyzes the work of professionals engaged, more or less explicitly, in architectural ethnography. The aim is to understand whether and how an ethnographic posture can be translated into effective representations of the interplay between social and material culture in spatial practices. The study also examines whether these representations provide useful insights for design and for testing design proposals. Finally, it seeks to define objectives and conditions for developing “Ethno-Graphs” in architecture and to foster ethnographic sensitivity in design schools beyond a purely toolkit-based approach.

(Politecnico di Milano | 2021-2022)

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