Nature-Centered Approach in Product Design: Artifacts for a Sustainable Future

In the evolution of the human being's material endowment, nature has been an important reference, formal, functional, and behavioral. Creative activity is by its very nature always characterized by careful observation of nature world, and the result is the construction of a simplified model of it. The processing path the designer takes to reach his synthesis (whether the goal is physical or digital, a product or a service) is always multilevel and multiscale. From a critical-ethical and social-cultural excursus of the ‘human being-nature’ relationship, this paper is part of the wide-ranging and current debate around the reasons that lead us to look again at Nature as a virtuous example for the development of human products and systems, seeking to explicate, at the same time, the opportunities and challenges that Nature-driven design offers to the culture of Design for Environmental Sustainability, to shape a possible and desirable future. Specifically, the work aims to define different expressive possibilities in design of physical artifacts, emerging from the investigation and understanding of Nature and its phenomena, shift the interest from a Human-Centred Design to a Nature-Centred Design approach.