News: Italian architecture and design magazine Domus has appointed architect and theorist Nicola Di Battista as its new editor, and announced a new editorial strategy.

Di Battista, who previously served as deputy director of Domus from 1989 to 1995, will take over from current editor Joseph Grima this summer. The September issue will be the first under the new editor.

The 59-year-old Italian will introduce a "Board of Maestri" consisting of five practicing architects: David Chipperfield, Kenneth Frampton, Hans Kollhoff, Werner Oechslin and Eduardo Souto de Moura.

"The decision to assemble a group of Maestri to support us with their authority, opinions, enthusiasm and advice stems from my conviction that there is a need to establish an empathic relationship between masters and the younger generation in order to promote this discipline’s worldwide advancement," Di Battista told the Domus website.

"This is how the magazine aims to fill an obvious gap in architecture journalism," he added. "The high standing of our publication will be greatly enriched by the presence of these high-profile Maestri, who will be invited to become leading figures in discussing and determining the strategic and cultural direction of the magazine."

The magazine is also introducing a "Study Centre" populated by young professionals "selected for their ability to offer a fresh perspective on contemporary architecture".

However the news was greeted by scepticism in some quarters. "Once great journal now in the hands of 'maestri' taking it back to the dark ages," tweeted architect Jeremy Till, who is head of Central St Martins in London.

"White male 'maestri' to have their egos stroked by new domus editorial concept," tweeted critic and V&A senior curator Kieran Long.

Grima, the current editor, joined Domus in 2010 as digital editor and became editor a year later, following the one-year editorship of architect and designer Alessandro Mendini, who had himself edited the publication 30 years earlier.

During his tenure, Grima overhauled the magazine's digital strategy, introduced new writers and ideas and curated the well-received Future in the Making exhibition on open design and digital manufacturing in Milan last year. See more stories about Joseph Grima.

Di Battista lives in Rome, where he has his studio, and is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Cagliari, Sardinia.

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Dezeen promotion: our Pinterest board full of all the best architecture images from Dezeen has been selected by the social network to feature as part of a campaign with bloggers in the UK today.

Pinterest allows users to collect and organise images known as pins onto categorised boards, with the option to add notes and links. Dezeen's architecture board is updated with pins from our stories, which link back to the posts so you can see additional pictures and find out more about the project.

We're constantly updating our channel, and boards we've recently added include one full of designs from Milan design week and another dedicated to Japanese houses.

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The Colors News Machine was created for the latest issue of Colors magazine by Canadian Jonathan Chomko, a interaction designer at Italian communications research centre Fabrica, as a mechanical allegory of contemporary news dissemination.

In the installation, a tweet sent to @colorsmachine is read out by a megaphone, captured on a tape recorder, converted into text and displayed on a television. It's then filmed on a camcorder and converted into a radio signal to be broadcast via an antenna. It's then picked up by a microphone, converted back into text and finally printed out as a headline.

"Sometimes the news comes through perfectly, but usually there's a small change in each stage and that makes for really a big difference at the end," Chomko told Dezeen.

The technological game of Chinese whispers uses common tools like language detection, Google translation, voice recognition and optical character recognition to replicate the errors that humans can make in digesting and passing on news. "In the end it's not really about the technology, it's about humans and the natural bias of hearing what you want to hear," explains Chomko.

"Once it's out there, the news gets replicated and copied and pasted from one media to the other," adds Cosimo Bizzarri, executive editor of Colors magazine. "The increased speed in production of news plus increased channels that it goes through from technology to technology means the final news that gets to you is possibly very different from what was put out there by a journalist."

The installation is on show as part of the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, until 28 April.

Last year we reported on an installation in London that took random snippets of news harvested from the internet, muddled them up and printed the resulting amusing headlines on a traditional wooden letterpress, intended to show that the more information we consume, the less we understand.

Here's some more information from Fabrica:

A behind-the-scenes look at modern journalism

COLORS Magazine will take part in the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, from April 24th to 28th with a preview of its new issue Making The News.

Today, 60% of British newspaper articles are copied from press releases and wire agency dispatches. American newspaper sales have shrunk by half in the last ten years. While traditional journalism is showing signs of crisis, new ways to make news are emerging. In Waziristan, Pakistan, where foreign journalists are forbidden, local photographer Noor Behram gathers and distributes unseen images of the aftermath of American drone attacks. Largely ignored by state television, footage of Egyptian anti-government protests are broadcast by activists in a makeshift outdoor movie theatre in Tahrir Square, Cairo. And in Mexico, where 52 journalists have been killed over the past seven years, the anonymously-run, crowd-sourced Blog del Narco has become a leading source of information on gang-related murders.

COLORS 86 takes a look behind the scenes of modern journalism, revealing tools and mechanisms used by old and new newsmakers: from paparazzi stakeouts to censorship, media hoaxes to photo-retouching tricks, not to mention cameras installed on drones, declarations of war via Twitter and Al Qaeda's activities on Facebook. To learn more, stop by the Raffaello room of Hotel Brufani at 11am on April 24th, where COLORS editor-in-chief Patrick Waterhouse will share his thoughts on making a magazine that, since 1991, has stood out for its striking photography and in-depth “slow journalism”.

The News Machine, an interactive installation designed and created by young talents at FABRICA, will also engage festival attendees from April 24th to 28th at the Spazio Cantarelli in Piazza della Repubblica 9. The installation is in continual motion, creating, transmitting and cannibalizing its own newsfeed across different media to stand as a mechanical allegory of newsmaking today.

COLORS is a quarterly, monothematic magazine founded in 1991 under the direction of Oliviero Toscani and Tibor Kalman. It is distributed internationally and published in six bilingual editions (English+Italian, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Portuguese). The COLORS editorial team is part of FABRICA, Benetton Group’s communications research centre, and is composed of an international team of young researchers, editors, art directors and photographers. It is assisted by the constant collaboration of a network of correspondents from every corner of the world.

Founded in 2006 by Arianna Ciccone and Christopher Potter, the International Journalism Festival is an event held in April each year in Perugia, Italy. It is a program of meetings, debates, interviews, book presentations, exhibitions and workshops that bring together the worlds of journalism, media and communications.

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Unlike traditional books or magazines, which are printed in bulk, a single copy of Print Shift is only produced when somebody orders it. Gittins believes this approach makes high-quality publishing much more accessible. "Blurb is a creative publishing platform that enables anyone in the world to make a proper book," she says.

As a keen photographer, Gittins says her "number one criteria" when she set up Blurb was image quality. "Could we, as a business, faithfully reproduce the intention of the artist, whether you're a photographer, a designer, an architect? I mean, that work needs to look beautiful, right?"

In Europe, Blurb's books and magazines are printed by RPI Paro in a factory in Eindhoven. Jan van Baar, vice president of sales and marketing for RPI Paro, explains that print-on-demand publishing is made possible by advances in digital printing technology. "We are in the middle of a digital revolution," he says. "Print-on-demand is a part of this. It is taking over the market from the older ways of printing because people won't need large numbers in one time. They want to have it tailor-made, one by one."

Gittins agrees. "A book is no longer as precious a thing as we used to think of it," she says. "If you're an architect and you've done a new project and you've got a book on file, just add the new project to it, maybe edit something old out, and you've got your latest and greatest work. It's always available, you can always get it printed on demand."

She continues: "I think it has completely changed how we think about books. They used to be permanent. You might make it once and maybe you'd make a second edition. Now you can make an edition a week if you wanted to."

Buy your copy of Print Shift for £8.95 plus postage and packing »

For more information about Print Shift and to see additional content, visit www.dezeen.com/printshift.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Lights by New Zealand producer SungNam. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen music Project.

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Our road trip takes us across the Netherlands and Belgium, where many of the major players in 3D printing are clustered, including Amsterdam-based design studio Freedom of Creation.

Since launching its first range of 3D-printed lamps in Milan in 2003, FOC has pioneered the use of 3D-printing technology to create finished consumer products. "When I first saw the technology, I was mesmerised,” says Janne Kyttanen (above), co-founder of FOC. “I was like, ‘Woah! This is really going to change the world.’ I immediately saw the whole future. People would download files, print things at home, share files with others. It would be this crazy, crazy world where you could just create whatever you wanted.”

Our next stop is Leuven, Belgium, home to Europe's biggest 3D-printing facility. Bart Van der Schueren (above), vice president at 3D-printing company Materialise, explains that more people now have access to 3D-printing technology than ever before.

"Rapid prototyping used to be an expensive technology," he says. "But the further we go in time the technology becomes more and more affordable. That is why the consumer [now] gets access to these technologies."

We finish our trip in Eindhoven at the offices of Shapeways, the world’s leading online 3D printing firm. Bart Veldhuizen (above), community manager at Shapeways, believes that 3D printing will soon become an indispensable technology in our lives.

"I really believe that in 10 to 15 years from now, if you looked back on the year 2013, you'd think: 'Wow, I couldn't get that customised? I couldn't get that coffee machine ten percent smaller? That's crazy, why not?'"

Print Shift was created by the Dezeen editorial team and produced with print-on-demand publisher Blurb. Eileen Gittins, Blurb CEO, explains how the ordering process works: "They'll be printed one at a time based on the orders. So you come to Blurb, you place an order for a copy, it will be printed to your spec in real time and it will arrive on your doorstep in about a week's time."

Buy your copy of Print Shift for £8.95 plus postage and packing »

For more information about Print Shift and to see additional content, visit www.dezeen.com/printshift.

The music featured in this movie is a track called New Territories by UK producer Sun Yin. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen music Project.

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