Designing emotions and shaping urban: new operational maps

Drawing – as a graphic sign and as a representative designo (Latin: indication, intention, instruction, impression, etc.) - is a crucial element in the (re)cognition and prospection of our living and relational spaces. Design and representation allow us to transform abstract concepts into tangible scenarios, favouring a critical-proactive understanding that is more visual and communicative, more "emotional" between environments and users, spaces and spatiality. Faced with the complexity of our current urban-territorial contexts, drawings, maps and representations are combined in order to favour more precise and sensitive investigations, aimed at combining visualisations of data and visions of scenarios. The article explores the role of design as a "map" and as a medium capable of translating the increasingly complex condition of the contemporary n-city, conceived as a multiple, dynamic and interactive "system of systems". Through the use of new strategic and evolutionary mapping techniques, both analogue and digital, innovative approaches are emerging aimed at the synthesis of information data, the definition of intentional strategies and the communication of shared images and imaginaries that delineate environmental, social, spatial, sensory and emotional horizons or criteria for action. Through the concept of a "diagrammatic or ideogrammatic map-device," the text paradoxically combines the more abstract notion of an "analytical-systemic operational map" with the more perceptive notion of an "analytical-synthetic communicative map". This approach, which focuses on the narrative, communicative and emotional capacity to organise and orient our functional and relational spaces in a more sustainable and inclusive way, emphasises the value of design itself as a mental map, a universal language and an operational and transformative tool.