Pino Trogu

Pino Trogu headshot

Pino Trogu

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Professor
School of Design, College of Liberal and Creative Arts

Email:
trogu@sfsu.edu
Phone Number:
Location:
HUM 248

At SF State Since:

2007

Office Hours:

Sunday: Closed
Monday: Closed
Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: Closed
Thursday: 9:00-12:00Appointments through Navigator Only
Friday: Closed
Saturday: Closed

Bio

I grew up on the island of Sardinia, Italy, where my father, who was a mason, taught me how to lay bricks in a straight line.

In Sardinia I attended the Istituto Statale d'Arte in Oristano, earning a diploma in Industrial Design in 1979. I earned a B.F.A. in graphic design in 1983 from the Istituto Superiore Industrie Artistiche in Urbino, Italy, and a M.F.A. in graphic design in 1985 from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, R.I., which I attended on a Fulbright scholarship.

I have been a generalist in my professional work as well as in my teaching, with projects ranging from museum exhibits to web design and film, and courses ranging from letterpress printing and bookbinding to drawing, environmental graphics, and information design. My research includes bioinspired design and psychology of perception, with a focus on metamaterials in the former and on working memory and cultural conventions in design in the latter, as they relate to problems of data visualization.

In the School of Design I teach Drafting and Sketching for Design, a hand-drawing class for industrial design majors, and Information Design: Data Visualization, which focuses on good graph construction. At State I have also taught Rapid Visualization and Letterpress Printing, using movable metal type and printing presses.

During the academic year 2017–2018 I was on sabbatical as a visiting scholar at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands, conducting research on bio-inspired design and transformable origami structures, hosted by Prof. Paul Breedveld (BITE Group), minimally invasive surgical instrumentation, in the bio-mechanical engineering department.

I will continue research on bio-inspired design and metamaterials during a 2024–2025 sabbatical year as a visting scholar at Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics and Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China, under the direction of Prof. Jian S. Dai, Dean of the Institute of Robotics, Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering.

From 2013 to 2016 I served in the Academic Senate as part of the Faculty Affairs Commitee (FAC) which I chaired in 2015–16. I was again in the Academic Senate, in the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) for from Fall 2022 to Spring 2024.

 

Websites

• www.trogu.com, 

• Giorgio Scarpa – bionics and metamaterials, 

• Data visualization student work archive, 

• Data visualization playlist, 

• Drawing & sketching playlist, 

• Stanza 153 Press (letterpress)

 

Recent Publications

Huijuan Feng, Wujie Shi, Pino Trogu and Jian S. Dai, Kinematic Modeling of a Flat-foldable Auxetic Metamaterial | 2024, 6th International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots (ReMAR), Chicago, USA. Copyright © IEEE. 

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Interview: Leonardo Book Club (Leonardo, MIT Press): Live discussion with Pino Trogu, author, “Giorgio Scarpa’s Model of a Sea Urchin Inspires New Instrumentation” – Length: 58:38. April 24, 2019.

Live discussion of my article on Giorgio Scarpa which was the featured article (free download) in the April 2019 issue of Leonardo journal (MIT Press).
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Trogu, Pino. Giorgio Scarpa’s Model of a Sea Urchin Inspires New Instrumentation – Leonardo, 52.2, MIT Press, 2019, pp. 146–151.

The article describes Giorgio Scarpa’s (Italy, 1938–2012) bionic model of “Aristotle’s Lantern” – the mouth of the sea urchin, and how it recently inspired designs for an experimental biopsy harvester and for a mini-rover prototype to collect soil samples on Mars.
"Leonardo is the leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music and, increasingly, the application and influence of the arts and humanities on science and technology."
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Trogu, Pino. Counting But Losing Count: the Legacy of Otto Neurath’s Isotype Charts – Visible Language, 52.2, 2018, pp. 83–109.

Despite their widespread use, the article questions the usefulness of bar charts made up of repeated little human figures or little dots, "and concludes that counting rows of pictograms is not as effective for reaching a total as reading an arabic number."
"Visible Language is the oldest peer–reviewed design journal (...) first published in 1967 [on the basis that] research and scholarly information [are] essential to the development of communication design and in particular to the development of typography in its support of reading and writing."
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Trogu, Pino. The Landscape of the Physical Book: Space and Memory in the Printed Page – TXT – The Book Issue, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 90–99.

Q: Why the puzzling resilience of printed books? A: Better learning by physically moving through the pages; The fixed shape and frame of reference of pages are great aids to memory; Paper and book design always guarantee proper functioning of reading activity.
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Trogu, Pino. The Image of the Book: Cognition and the Printed Page – Design Issues, 31.3, MIT Press, 2015, pp. 28–40.

Is it possible that in another five hundred years, paper will be obsolete as the material of choice for making books, and that only digital books will be available? Even though digital gurus such as Nicholas Negroponte, who in 2010 said that physical books had five years of life left in them, assure us this is the case, perhaps this obsolescence will not fully happen because of certain qualities of the printed book that complement a reader’s psychological makeup.
Design Issues is "the first American academic journal to examine design history, theory, and criticism. Design Issues provokes inquiry into the cultural and intellectual issues surrounding design."