Riccardo Campa

The article is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between the program and the actual
achievements of Italian Futurism. The Futurists introduce in literature the themes of the new urban,
industrial, dynamic, technological, and tumultuous civilization, through a poetic which, without
inhibitions, breaks linguistic, pictorial, rhetorical, and metric rules. The “words-in-freedom”
program leads to the “liberation” of various forms of energy and vitality, and opens the way for
a revolution in the perception of reality. The principle of mimesis gives way to free creation,
which breaks down the boundaries between the fine arts and engineering, between artistic
disciplines and life experience. The futurists seek not only the natural sublime as their predecessors,
but also produce and glorify the artificial sublime, made through science and technology

The goal of this article is to seek a path of cooperation between engineers and sociologists in view of the construction of increasingly sophisticated social robots. First, I show how humanoid and animaloidcompanion robots are used in the field of applied sociology and social work. Secondly, I explore several problems relating to social robotics, and in particular those of effectiveness and safety of human-robot interaction. Finally, I emphasize that two key concepts in this research area are scenario and persona. Trained sociologists and psychologists may give a substantive contribution to the development of social robotics by helping engineers in the creation of scenarios and personas.

The figure of the flâneur is attracting growing interest among sociologists. The question that has stimulated this research is the following: which is the “role” of the flâneur in the social system? After having briefly expounded the Theory of Roles, we examine some sociological works which seem particularly useful to formulate a response. Our analysis is primarily focused on the works of Walter Benjamin, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Giampaolo Nuvolati, taken as paradigmatic cases of four possible perspectives.