Animals and design: the influence of animal world towards human equipment design.

The efforts of our ancestors in the definition of the useful tools for everyday needs induce us to reflect on the role that the animal kingdom and its extraordinary dynamics has had on their technical and formal development. Artifacts provide, in fact, fundamental information on the cultural and historical roots of the human community and constitute an essential lesson in design. The common object, the work tool, the artisan instrument and the most banal furnishings (that are, however, part of the anthropised surroundings in which man moves and operates) have always been forgotten or at least marginalised. Yet it is precisely the evolution of this extraordinary repertoire of apparently simple ‘things’ which allows us today to record the huge intellectual and design-oriented work developed for the realisation of the main archetypes of the objects that we still use today and, especially, to identify the fundamental passages that have refined them until they reached their definitive beauty, in the individual moments of social evolution of the various human tribes.