OVERVIEW

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AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Other activities provided are aimed at further developing students' language skills, IT skills, interpersonal skills, as well as other skills that are aimed at facilitating professional choices or that are nevertheless generally useful for entering the job market.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims to explain the fundamental categories of anthropological-mental and neuroscientific analysis, which are useful for understanding contemporary Western culture. The purpose is to equip students with the basic concepts related to the strategies, techniques, and cognitive tools that can be applied in nautical and naval design.

PREREQUISITES

No specific prerequisites are required to engage with the course content.

TEACHING METHODS

Lectures

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Propaedeutic Part, the different facets of Practical Thinking:
Critical-Argumentative Thinking
Creative-Generative Thinking
Emotive-Relational Thinking
Ethical-Axiological Thinking.
GENERAL MONOGRAPHIC PART
Theoretical-formal aspects covered during the academic year, in the semester course
Introductions to Psychology and Anthropology for Design
The origins of the discipline: the concept of the brain. The Egyptian papyrus of 3000 BC. Democritus. Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Herophilus and Erasistratus. Galen. Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius: human anatomy. Descartes and the pineal gland. Thomas Willis and the Circle of Willis. F.J. Gall. Camillo Golgi.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Neuron Doctrine. Pierre Paul Broca and the area responsible for language. J.H. Jackson and epilepsy. Introduction to language formation in the human brain and mind.
The origins of Cultural Anthropology
Brief overview of thought and reasoning. Brief overview of language. Brief overview of the concept of communication. In-depth exploration of the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Mention of theories on cognitive-emotional models. Aristotelian deductive and inductive logical reasoning.
Concrete examples of their application to the world of nautical and naval design. Brief mention of Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Brief mention of the concept of intelligence and creativity. Brief mention of the concept of prototype and model, according to the perspective of Psycho-anthropology of Design.
Some general aspects
Probability and decision-making. Problem-solving: reorganisation problems; discovery problems; transformation problems; an introduction to Insight and Gestalt Theory: productive thinking and reproductive thinking.
Functional fixedness as a barrier to problem-solving. Expertise, i.e., practice and experience as acquired knowledge.
The Central Nervous System
The neocortex. The visual system: Cones and Rods. Transduction of the visual signal. The receptive field. Visual pathways and the primary visual cortex. Vision and eye movements. Some pathologies of vision.
Vision, recognition, and memory. The auditory system. The tonotopic organisation of the auditory system. Taste. Smell and the seven primary odours. The Stereochemical Theory. Hunger.
The multisensory perspective
Aristotle and the 11 senses. Multisensoriality. Energy variations. The escape route from extinction. Jerry Fodor's modular mind. Vertical faculties. Domain specificity. Obligatory functioning. Limited central access. Speed of functioning.
Information encapsulation. Horizontal faculties. The Müller-Lyer illusion. J. Gibson's ecological theory and perceptual systems. The trichromatic theory of vision. What is an object? Perceptual units or grouping. What appears and what can become. Gestalt.
Gestalt Theory in Design:
The laws of perception according to Gestalt Psychology (Psychology of Form). Proximity; Similarity; Common fate; Simplicity or Prägnanz.
Continuation of Gestalt Laws: Good continuation; Closure; Habit; Habit from an anthropological-mental perspective. Time and identity. Experience and habit.
Perceptual recognition
Crossmodal recognition. Theories of structural representations. Geon Theory. Template or multiple-view theories. The multiple routes theory. fMRI. Perception and manipulation. William Molyneux's question. The critical period and the sensitive period.
The relationship between critical period and sensitive period. Sensory substitution and vicarious systems. Aristotle and Form. Numerosity and movement. Sensory substitution devices. Repeated suppression and mnemonic reinforcement. Sensory information processing times.
The project from a psychological perspective
From the design "I" to the design "WE". Subitising. The subitising range. Counting. The peripersonal field. Three-dimensionality in two-dimensionality. One knows when one acts.
Space and the geographical environment and behavioural environment. The Transformer. The designer's world and cognitive representations. Cognitive processes and agentive causality. The designer's task and its emergent properties. Cataloguing, Quantification, and Evaluation.
Representation
The designer's responsibility. Environment and territory. Self-monitoring. Flexible thinking. Resolutive representations.
Iconic representation. Schematic representation. Situational representation. The decision-making process. Behavioural decision. From competition to cooperation.
Memory and its functioning
Forgetting. Multisensoriality in memory. Associative representation. Storing and future reactivation. Hebb's axiom. The engram. Explicit and implicit memory. Mental models. Time and memory. Noetic memory and autonoetic memory.
Cortical consolidation and cortical retrieval. Ecphory. Meaning, desires, passions, and expectations. The mental schema: Marvin Minsky. Frames. Schematisation or modelling. Visual acuity. Light waves: Wavelength, Intensity or amplitude, and Purity.
General Principles of Anthropology for Design
How and when Anthropology for Design emerged. The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The concepts of society and culture. The concept of the total institution. Work and its social problems. Communication and the media. Advantages and disadvantages of industrialisation. Delocalised production and the concept of "post-industrial". Globalisation and the glocal. Unemployment and non-employment. The Welfare State.
How contemporary Western society can be analysed today. The traditional sociology of Robert King Merton from the 1970s. Serendipity and the self-fulfilling prophecy. The concepts of "ends" and "means". Cognitive-spatial maps. The concept of "scenario". The concepts of "tolerance" and "coexistence". Individual and relational social capital. Relational urban capital. The concept of "symbol" in Anthropology of Design. Social interaction between user and object.
The designer's gaze
The designer, between attitude and conviction. What information means. We are continually influenced. Advertising. The case of the Bestseller. Systemic and heuristic persuasion.
Design phenomenology
Edmund Husserl and phenomenology. Perception as experience. "All looking is a determined seeing". The concept of attitude. Between genetics and culture. The concept of attitude in Carl Gustav Jung's Psychological Types (1921). Conscious attitudes. Unconscious attitudes.
Attitude
Introverted attitude. Anima. External attitude. The persona. The concept of attitude in Karl Jaspers. Psychology of Worldviews (1919). Jerry Fodor's concept of attitude. Propositional attitude.
The task of the nautical and naval designer and neuroaesthetics. Semir Zeki's neuroaesthetics. Cooperation. Tradition according to Marvin Harris. Collaboration. Cooperative learning. Human gesturality. Symbolic signification. Joint intentionality.
The designer's vision
No one is ever alone. Relevance hypotheses. The designer's responses to the world. Retroactive thinking. Causal and intentional relations. Antecedent as cause and consequent as effect. Relevance. Hypotheses for achieving relevance. Final result.
Temporal vision. Spatial vision. Jean Piaget's inferential simulation. Behavioural self-assessment. How to proceed and the cognitive characteristics of this mental process. Intentionality and action. Designing cooperation. Relational thinking.
The designer of the present and future
Emotions and happiness: emotional thinking. The six primary emotions. From primary to fundamental emotions: immediacy, specificity, and intensity. The spiral of emotions: infographic. The Amygdala and its role in emotion formation. The nucleus accumbens. To move (emotionally), i.e., to set in motion together with others, with others. Energy flows. The state of flow. Consciousness in emotions, and in emotional design. The mind loves: the affective function of knowledge and its use in design.
SPECIAL MONOGRAPHIC PART
The text: Bertirotti A., 2022, La mente ama. Per sapere ciò che siamo con gli affetti e la propria storia [The Mind Loves. To Know Who We Are Through Affections and Our Own History], Lucia Pugliese – Il Pozzo di Micene Editore, Florence.
First chapter. Definition of the term anthropology and its field of application. Relevance to the world of industrial design. Introduction to the concept of nature. Birth and growth. Role of play in the learning process. Definition of affection. Life and death as a continuous process of regeneration. Process of signification. Constitution of abstract thought. Role of the five senses. Cognitive process of data discretisation (notes on quantum physics and rational mechanics). Mind-body relationship. Difference between mystery and the unknown. How objects placed in a space can modify the entire perception of the space itself (Gestalt Theory). Desirable level of originality in a project. Practical examples related to the world of naval and nautical design.
Second chapter. Mechanism for reducing complexity through the logic of cause and effect succession. Explanation of the concept of lifestyle as an internalised and stabilised system of visible behaviours. Time and space. Doubt as a cognitive strategy. Pain as a metaphysical place of destruction and rebirth (psycho-anthropological references to the current pandemic situation).
Third chapter. Role of movement in the perception of one's own existence. Limits of science in approaching the noumenal dimension. Introduction to the concept of myelination. Anthropological attribution of value. Habit and loss. Definition of resilience. Extensive notes on the world of Operations Management: role of Continuous Improvement, in relation to Deming's cycle, in the field of naval and nautical design.
Fourth chapter. Role of the number two (mother-child relationship, two parents, person-surrounding world relationship) and the number three (mother-child-father, brain-function-reality relationship). Brain-mind-memory link. The phenomenon of Entanglement. The Universe as a Cosmic Network of Loving Relations. Breaking an equilibrium through choice. How the surrounding environment influences our decisions. Role of memory. Falling in love and love. Perception of loneliness.
Fifth chapter. Learning configurations. Role of primordial actions in the formation of symbolic thought. Mirror neurons. Language as a codified expression of what happens to us daily (its limits according to Wittgenstein's thought). Behaviour of neurons in organisational and functional terms. Definitions of ethics and morals. Telecommunication: psycho-anthropological implications. Habituation as a progressive loss of awareness. Human-artificial intelligence relationship. Can a robot ever help us to love?

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bertirotti A., 2022, Il Design in mente, Lucia Pugliese - Il Pozzo di Micene Editore, Firense

- Bertirotti A., 2021, La mente ama. Per capire ciò che siamo con gli affetti e la propria storia, Lucia Pugliese Editore - Il Pozzo di Micene, Firenze.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

LESSONS

LESSONS START

As per academic calendar

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

Oral assessment method

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The assessment of the skills acquired during the course will take place through the exam.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Students with disabilities or DSA can request compensatory/dispensatory measures for the exam.