SCARTO

The Italian verb scartare, akin to the French écarter, encompasses a series of meanings that, in English, require multiple terms. All of them originate from a gesture of choice. Scartare describes the act of setting something apart by selecting only that which meets a specific criterion and excluding that which does not. The noun scarto signifies that which remains after this selection, the leftovers. It becomes a gap when indicating a distance from a reference point, showing how far something is from what should have happened. When it pertains to a deviation from a planned course, it signals a drift. It also describes what is pushed outside and excluded. The reflexive form s’écarter in French signifies the deliberate act of stepping aside as a form of refusal or self-protection. These notes connect these meanings of scarto to design practices through activities developed in the course Representação e Conhecimento (Representation and Knowledge) at the University of Aveiro. In this context, students learn how observation, description, and representation turn situated experience into visual or verbal accounts. These processes engage with the various meanings of scarto: observation involves selection, description generates leftovers, and representation introduces a gap between an event and its account. A new exercise, presented in this poster, examines how generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) modifies these dynamics by producing synthetic representations from textual descriptions, foregrounding additional meanings of scarto.