The aim of this issue of DIID is to describe design as inventor through narrations and illustrations of approaches, experimentation and projects. A useful mapping to re-read the design complexity in order to explore its present boundaries and lay down guidelines for its future developments. Invention pins down a possible solution that the maker uncovers amidst available knowledge. Thinking, inventing and producing: reality - the physical and psychic world - becomes material for continuous investigation and interpretation. Design research 'disrupts to re-arrange', namely, it seeks to achieve original results via re-discussing previously envisaged well-established paradigms and schemes. A penchant for experimentation and contamination allow to define design as inventor: a 'special place' not only for engineering invention, but also for a quest for new forms of behaviour, new material or sensory worlds that can originate radically innovative relationships between men and artefacts.

The first book in a new series, which investigates the decisive relationship between nature, food and living, offering easy, healthy recipes, extraordinary landscapes, simple houses and gardens, and the best products.

The essay in this volume reflects upon two key attributes of the ephemeral city of the Kumbh Mela and the lessons we can extrapolate from it for architecture, urban design, and planning in the contemporary world. 400 colour

Today Venice is facing major problems, an overload of tourists and a declining population as well as its precipitous tidal and structural dilemmas. It is to be hoped that it does not become a theme park dead city. The results of the UNSW workshops prove that appropriate housing is able to be successfully integrated into the existing Venetian topography, which proves to still be a dynamic alive city with modern buildings while still embracing its overpowering heritage.

Monograph.it is a unique contemporary magazine that combines monography and review. Each volume follows an original structure, although all devote several pages to the study of architecture. Accompanying these case studies are galleries flush with places, buildings, and landscapes; when combined with detailed studies focussing on cities in evolution, Monograph.it encourages its readers to conceive of urbanisation and landscape as mutually complementary. The aim of this is to provide a comprehensive overview that acknowledges differing development-speeds of architectural productions, across a variety of scales. An ongoing project, this survey will be summarised in 'Researches' (a chapter to be published in the next issue). This will stress the importance of encouraging innovation in students of architecture. Monograph.it acts as a platform for theoretical debate, conducting interviews and hosting essays from big-name figures in the architecture world - for example, the man featured in this issue: Diego Chilo. Chilo has been active in construction design from the early '80s, and has collaborated on numerous projects to create remarkable interiors and exteriors. Known for his artistic collaborations as well as his own unique personal inputs into his work, Chilo is a welcome face in Monograph.it's gallery of featured architects.

Design After Modernity, monograph edition of DIID (Design Industriale/Industrial Design), introduces a series of reflections on modernity and its relation to the issues of design planning. It therefore opens the debate on the reorganisation and new articulations of our time, beyond the nostalgia for a past that can become a shelter, and to escape from an uncertain future, that can become a threat. Following the times of great collective projects, the idea of progress is more and more private in this omnivorous present. Which is the project's destiny in a time of refusal of the progressive development of history? If designing the artificial is one representation of our material culture, which are the forms that a collective project can still interpret? Will design be able to rebuild a collective idea of the future?