Special on Automotive and Covid-19. Includes also the special insert ICT - Industrial Cleaning Technologies.
Contamination and hybridisation: the mixing of shapes, the fusion of elements of different origin, the combination of different functions and models to generate new and unexpected ones. Is this the future? Is it hybridisation understood as an escape from the limits imposed by this pandemic, which has subverted the world, erected walls and borders where they had been torn down, and suspended globalisation (while highlighting all its limits)?
For the first time ever, half of humanity has been locked up in their homes for quite a long time, subjected to unprecedented restrictions of personal freedom and with disruptive effects on social, emotional, economic, cultural, educational, recreational, and tourism life. We had the perception of limits, as opposed to the openness proclaimed and supported by globalisation. What has happened will bring about radical changes in perspective and those who will first adapt to that new perspective will first emerge victorious from this situation.
For instance, the hybridisation of technologies and forms of communication has been extremely helpful in overcoming the current limits placed on social relations and the mobility of people and goods but, when we will return to normality, it will also be a tool to be exploited to give added value to one's own work or business idea.
With an already well-established digital version of our ipcm® magazines, we have been able not to stop publishing any issues and not to delay any releases despite nearly three months of lockdown. Using the most advanced digital tools and platforms, the ipcm® editorial staff produced four magazines in three months. You are about to read (hopefully) the last one created during lockdown - one of the main issues of the year, our long-awaited Automotive Special. Thanks to the collaboration of our customers and interviewees, who have enthusiastically accepted new ways of meeting to enable us to write our exclusive articles, we have managed to report about the latest technologies of the automotive industry.
Above all, we have devoted an entire section of the magazine to the efforts that the surface treatment industry has made to put itself at the service of the battle against Covid-19: a series of articles that testifies how dynamic, multifaceted, and active this sector is.
Finally, this edition includes the special insert ICT_Industrial Cleaning Technologies, the insert dedicated to the innovations of the industrial cleaning sector.