Stop-motion animation history has been put on paper by several scholars and practitioners who tried to organize 120 years of technological innovations and material experiments dealing with a huge literature. Bruce Holman (1975), Neil Pettigrew (1999, Ken Priebe (2010), Stefano Bessoni (2014), and more recently Adrián Encinas Salamanca (2017), provided the most detailed even tough partial attempts of systematization, and designed historical reconstructions by considering specific periods of time, film lengths or the use of stop-motion as special effect rather than an animation technique. This article provides another partial historical reconstruction of the evolution of stop-motion and outlines the main events that occurred in the development of this technique, following criteria based on the innovations in the technology of materials and manufacturing processes that have influenced the fabrication of puppets until the present day. The systematization follows a chronological order and takes into account events that changed the technique of a puppets' manufacturing process as a consequence of the use of either new fabrication processes or materials. Starting from the accident that made the French film-pioneer Georges Méliès discover the trick of the replacement technique at the end of the nineteenth century, the reconstruction goes through 120 years of experiments and films. "Build up" puppets fabricated by the Russian puppet animator Ladislaw Starevicz with insect exoskeletons, the use of clay puppets and the innovations introduced by LAIKA entertainment in the last decade such as Stereoscopic photography and the 3D computer printed replacement pieces, and then the increasing influence of digital technologies in the process of puppet fabrication are some of the main considered events. Technology transfers, new materials' features, innovations in the way of animating puppets, are the main aspects through which this historical analysis approaches the previously mentioned events. This short analysis is supposed to remind and demonstrate that stop-motion animation is an interdisciplinary occasion of both artistic expression and technological experimentation, and that its evolution and aesthetic is related to cultural, geographical and technological issues. Lastly, if the technology of materials and processes is a constantly evolving field, what future can be expected for this cinematographic technique? The article ends with this open question and without providing an answer it implicitly states the role of stop-motion as a driving force for innovations that come from other fields and are incentivized by the needs of this specific sector.

In recent years, co-creation and collaboration platforms to create and deliver new products and services have taken a step forward; this has led to the development of a new active involvement of users, who from co-designers have become independent designers, even if not experts. Co-design is dynamic and provides the tools to generate democratic design processes guided by the users themselves. The democratization of design tools is the premise for a new paradigm defined ‘Diffuse Design’ by Manzini (2015). This contribution explores the approaches of open design and open production with particular attention to the field of visual communication and the production of motion design artifacts. After an introduction to the co-design framework, the main open-production visual communication platforms are presented to offer an overview of the topic. Next, the potential of online platforms to enable non-designers to produce animated artifacts is explored by examining student projects in a motion design University course. The most significant outputs of the student experience are then described and critically analyzed. Finally, the conclusions investigate the different perspectives for reading the democratization of tools for creating visual artifacts and lay the foundations for future lines of research.

In his book "Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method" (1980), Gerald Genette describes the relationship between narrative levels, and defines 'meta-diegetic' the level that occurs in parallel with the primary narrative. Genette does not specify who or what the narrator has to be in the meta-diegetic narrative level, it could be also something lifeless, like an object, or a material. This observation is particularly suitable if applied to stop-motion animation technique, and in this article I suggest that in stop-motion films the superficial qualities of the materials that compose the puppet perform a meta-diegetic narrative. Exploring the definitions of performance in both design and puppetry, and the qualities of material skin, I apply these theoretical assumptions to the analysis of animated puppets and formulate the concept of "performance of puppets' skin material". The analysed performer, therefore, is neither the actor/animator/puppeteer, nor the actant puppet itself, but the puppet's material skin, and its performance is defined through qualities that the viewer can haptically experience through the screen. Approaching puppets' skin from an interdisciplinary perspective, the article provides a definition of its performance based on qualities ("functional", "processual", "active", "pervasive", "ritual", "evocative" and "multi-dimensional") that describe puppets' skin's power to satisfy technical aspects of our experience of the object moving on screen, to engage our senses, allowing us to haptically experience the objects, and to stimulate our thoughts and memories. The article aims at providing a theoretical premise to the analytical approach that considers animation to be a powerful expressive material medium that opens up possibilities of analysis through design tools.

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