diid — disegno industriale industrial design

Boosting Sustainable Consumption Behaviour Through Consumer Education in the Fashion Retail and Service Environment

Alessandra Spagnoli — 2023-12-31

Due to the growing environmental impact of the fashion industry, the demand for sustainable consumption is currently an urgent issue. The exponential increase of textile waste and the progressive reduction of product lifespan call for a shift to circular models, and in this context, consumer awareness has also become crucial. The retail environment, driven by an increasing shift towards a servitisation of the consumer experience, with its associated Product-Service Systems (PSSs), can provide a compelling opportunity to nurture consumer awareness, thus acting as a proactive mechanism to induce more responsible and sustainable behaviour. Within this framework, retail design is emerging as a key driver for sustainable behavioural changes in fashion consumption. This article, therefore, reflects on how fashion brands are actively orchestrating strategies within retail, defining dedicated PPSs to promote responsible consumption practices involving informative content, empowerment tools and co-creation initiatives that, going beyond awareness, can evolve into advocacy.

Debating (In)Justice of Energy Futures Through Design

Roberta Antognini — 2023-12-31

This article presents a design investigation of how to address social justice concerns in participatory activities when debating energy futures. As the climate crisis grows and technological progress exacerbates environmental issues, the design field is increasingly committed to understanding and mitigating the impact of new products in the world. This is resulting in a conscious redesign of products or in developing strategies to nudge sustainable behaviours. Yet little methodological work exists on how to address social concerns when designing in the context of energy transitions. This paper explores this gap by delineating an energy scenario of Switzerland in 2030, designing two fictional artefacts and a participatory toolkit, and then hosting a world café with twelve participants. The results provide insights into the value as well as the methodological challenges of designing for debating justice in energy futures.

Design: Episteme and Doxa. Co-design as an Opportunity to Share Choices

Luciano Perondi — 2023-12-31

This paper delves into the concept of co-design, a collaborative approach involving stakeholders in the conceptualization and design phases to understand diverse perspectives and jointly define project directions. Examining the relationships between co-design, Design Thinking, and user-centred design, the paper emphasises distinctions in their goals and methods. It addresses potential biases in co-design processes, providing strategies to mitigate analogical relations, cognitive effort minimization, and emotional influences. Epistemological reflections highlight the efficacy of participatory methods in generating theoretical hypotheses while underscoring the need for evidence-based validation. The article explores co-design’s applications in speculative design and ludo-didactics (game design). In speculative design, co-design aids in framing problems and generating plausible contextualizations, while in game design, participatory processes, particularly playtesting, enhance the exploratory and refinement phases. The paper suggests avenues for further research, emphasising the strategic placement of Co-design processes in project phases, considering potential biases, and exploring its application in disruptive innovation contexts.

Synesthetic Identities

Chiara Scarpitti — 2023-12-31

Synesthetic identities is part of a research study that looks at the landscape as a living organism, mutable and connected to a complex ecosystem of physical and immaterial elements. Starting with well-established theoretical principles, the paper describes an experiment conducted in 2021 using brain-computer interfaces to demonstrate how the visual landscape is not immutable, identical for everyone, and static in time. Instead, it strictly depends on the relationship established with the viewer and the interpolation of a series of variables - sound, colour, and light - that influence perception. The outcome demonstrates how it is necessary to rethink visual landscapes by looking at them as plural, mutable systems, constantly reconfigured by the relationship with the human body, thus opening up new design possibilities in the field of visual design.

Bringing Culture to People: A Co-design Method for Redefining the Role of the Museum

Patrizia Marti — 2023-12-31

ICOM (International Council of Museums) envisions a role for the museum as an accessible and inclusive institution open to the public, which operates professionally and with the participation of communities. This vision requires research and practice to be fully implemented. The paper illustrates the participatory ideation and evaluation of new museum services that are inclusive and accessible for people who cannot visit the museum due to disability and age-related impairments. It illustrates the co-design process carried out within the EU project BeauCoup, which aims to make the cultural heritage accessible beyond the museum’s walls. This objective implies that the museum must play a key role in promoting inter-institutional partnerships between the cultural and the social sectors to engage marginalised communities. The paper describes the approach and the outcomes of the co-design process which involved various stakeholders and institutions, offering a reflection on the benefits and shortcomings of the approach.

Promoting Active Living and Sports as a Node for Wellbeing

Maddalena Coccagna — 2023-12-31

Physical inactivity is associated with various chronic diseases and early death. The pandemic and the economic crisis worsened mental disorders and the inability to cope with stress in healthy ways. People with disabilities may represent a barometer to quantify and assess equal access to sports. A multilevel strategy for the development of both social and physical environments must overcome the ‘medical’ meaning of health, dealing increasingly with a broader disability culture design. The promotion of an active lifestyle for all is a thread common to design products and services, with several national and international proposals to enable both a physical and service-based accessibility to wellness opportunities. A short field research conducted during the pandemic, starting from a visual campaign for athletes with Down syndrome, suggested a wide-ranging reflection on sports as amusement, on inclusive language and on equal participation in sports opportunities.

Design Interventions for the Sustainable Livelihood of the Bamboo Craft Community

Avinash Shende — 2023-12-31

Bamboo is a plentifully available material in India’s North-Eastern Region (NER), comprising eight states. Bamboo craft serves as a crucial source of livelihood in these states. Meghalaya, one of the NER states, has a centuries-old tradition of practising the woven bamboo craft. The state is somewhat isolated from mainstream developmental activities, leading to a persistently unchanged livelihood structure over generations. The absence of infrastructure and limited technological access has empowered these communities to exercise increased autonomy, thereby preventing them from participating in the country’s circular economy. The paper delves into the challenges faced by bamboo craft communities, exploring issues related to their practices, livelihoods, and culture. It also shares the experiences and insights gained from a three-year-long collaborative design intervention project called Shken.in.

Editorial

Flaviano Celaschi — 2023-12-31

Culture and Creativity Take Center Stage in the EU: How We Got to the EIT-KIC, and What Lies Ahead

Pier Luigi Sacco — 2023-12-31

The foundation for the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity was laid in many steps, through a series of EU policy developments. Moving from the seminal report on The Economy of Culture promoted by the acting European Commissioner for Culture Jan Figel in 2006, we have witnessed a gradual development of the idea that cultural and creative sectors are a main driver of socio-economic development in Europe. This trajectory can be reconstructed in the sequence of the Work Plans for Culture that have spanned the last decade and in a few milestones such as the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 and its major legacies, the European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage and the New European Agenda for Culture. Let’s briefly consider how all such components have been instrumental to the birth of the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity, and how an understanding of such process is still fundamental today to fully appreciate the potential and criticalities of this new, ambitious endeavor.

Unleashing Culture and Creativity Power in European Education Processes

Valentina Gianfrate — 2023-12-31

The European educational system stands in a unique position at the crossroads of training, research and innovation, in shaping sustainable and resilient economies, and in making its territories greener, more inclusive and more digital through culture and creativity. This paper is the result of a one-year collaboration between the Alma Mater Studiorum — Università di Bologna and the Jagiellonian University, under the umbrella of the EIT Culture & Creativity (EIT C&C), in the interim co-chairing of the Direction linked to the Action Program 1 Talent Scaler, to define activities and strategies for the operationalization of the Strategic Objective 1 about Education. This involvement opened up the possibility to activate a fruitful international cooperation with all the members of Una Europa, the alliance of Europe’s eleven largest leading research universities that aim to create a truly European inter-university environment, a University of the Future.

Our Creative Nature: Future Skilling Research in Times of Transition

Soenke Zehle — 2023-12-31

This essay introduces CYANOTYPES, a collaborative multi-year research project that set out to explore and address how people across the creative sector — arts, culture, and design in all their manifestations — might organise learning in the (immediate) future, and outlines a creative agency model to facilitate the development of curricula and custom learning journeys, contending that especially in the context of the growing role of intelligent systems in the creative process, a focus on creative agency makes sense to frame the analysis as well as the design of learning processes.

The Innovation System in Transformation

Jenny Tingvall Kornmacher — 2023-12-31

In the light of the pressing global challenges, our need for innovation has dramatically changed. Instead of technical innovation alone, we need solutions on a much larger scale as well. The text analyses the transformation of the discourse on innovation in the last two decades, trying to illustrate the progressive shift of meanings, actors and tools involved in the process and what caused it. In the last decade, a slow mutation has occurred from the concept of creative and critical practice in the hands of creative individuals to creativity-driven innovation brought by the whole Cultural and Creative Sector and Industries (CCSI), and promoted by the establishment of the new EIT Culture & Creativity Knowledge Innovation Community in 2023. Nowadays, the debate on how to improve innovation and competitiveness must shift the attention from subjects and objects to support structures and ecosystems. Thanks to the analysis of case-studies, four possible contemporary design approaches to innovation have been identified: advanced design innovation, responsible innovation, knowledge innovation, cross-sectoral innovation. The selected case-studies and an interview with a Swedish artist illustrate the role of universities, research centres and public labs as structures supporting cross-sectorial innovation including CCSI in their research since the beginning.

Ars Electronica

Nicoletta Tranquillo — 2023-12-31

Ars Electronica