About
45
Publications
20,161
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189
Citations
Introduction
PhD, associate professor at the Politecnico di Milano where he teaches Spatial Design and Product Service System Design. Coordinator of GIDE (Group of International Design Education) and member of the international coordination at DESIS Network (Design for Social innovation and Sustainaibility). Adjunct professor at Tongji University. He created “Coltivando, the convivial garden at the Politecnico di Milano” and belongs to humancities.eu. Awarded in 2018 by the "XXV Compasso d'Oro" for the applied research "campUS-Incubation and settings for social practices"
Current institution
Additional affiliations
October 2015 - present
Position
- Professor (Associate)
Description
- Full time position as Associate professor in Design. Currently teaching in Interior and Spaces Design, Product Service System Design.
February 2014 - October 2015
September 2004 - December 2013
Position
- Researcher (research fellow)
Description
- During this time I have been involved in several research program within the EU fundings and national ones.
Education
January 2005 - March 2017
January 2003 - January 2006
October 1994 - October 2000
Publications
Publications (45)
This paper illustrates a project to redesign a charitable initiative against food poverty into an innovative solution called "SOSpesa", implemented in a neighborhood of the city of Milan named NoLo - North of Loreto. The paper outlines approach, methodology and strategy to move from an activist initiative to a service with more than charitable purp...
This paper aims to highlight the design-led process in the research and the range of its application in contexts beyond the mainstream: the decentralized areas, defined as “small and remote places”. This is based on an ongoing action-research project called SMOTIES - Creative works with small and remote places, a four-year co-funded project by the...
Neighborhoods today emerges as “design incubators” as they are characterized by the proactivity of local actors — such as citizens, shopkeepers, associations, informal groups — acting at the core of the design process by developing brand-new and tailor-made solutions and at the same time provide environmental, economic, and social beneficial transf...
This paper presents and discusses the redesign of a charity activity, implemented in a neighbourhood of the city of Milan, into an innovative service called 'SOSpesa'. By creating, activating and experimenting a network of local actors to achieve a solidarity aim against food poverty, SOSpesa also implements a strategy to fight food waste and suppo...
This article argues that if we want to discuss the contemporary community, we may look at them as being formed by a set of projects that continue to contribute to its ongoing existence in order to remain active. To offer a concrete example of this argument, the article is based on the work done by the authors over several years in the field of Desi...
The paper presents a context-based and cross-disciplinary research, reflecting on how a participatory design(PD)-driven approach, embedded with narrative structures, could stimulate citizens’ ability to envision plural understandings of their own city. The project is focused on the city of Ivrea, recently named for its industrial past in the UNESCO...
The regeneration of the commons occurs through direct involvement of groups of people who interact closely with spaces, and who aim to improve the overall quality of life and experiences connected with those spaces. This process starts from an increased consciousness towards places that do not belong to the private realm but are public or can poten...
This chapter is about the impact and legacy of the campUS project related to the wider topic of universities as drivers of social innovation. It involves a comparison of the previous chapters, offering a discussion of the research actions conducted in the campUS programme. By discussing the various actions implemented, the specific or shared method...
This book reviews the social role of universities in their local urban contexts and describes a number of initiatives of major interest in terms of the impact achieved, the range of stakeholders involved, and the significance of the university campus and teachers as agents of change. It is divided into three parts, the first of which draws on the i...
The regeneration of the commons occurs through direct involvement of groups of people who interact closely with spaces and who aim to improve the overall quality of life and experiences connected with those spaces. This process starts from an increased consciousness towards places that do not belong to the private realm but are public or can potent...
This chapter is about tools to be used when designing a new community garden in an urban context or when improving existing ones. Tools are considered here to be a result of design activity since they were concepted, created, prototyped and tested by the author and the research team (the “Polimi DESIS Lab”) in several research and teaching activiti...
Environmental and social responsibility programmes in universities are nowadays developing a collection of initiatives that involve not only their direct users (students, teachers and staff) but wider range of people living in the surrounding districts. Community gardens are often included in these programmes as a means of integrating the universit...
This chapter investigates the relationship between universities and the cities in which they are located. It explores the meaning of university campuses, how they are connected with the urban and the social/economic fabric by exploring the three-dimensional missions universities have: educational, research, and relations with the external. Focusing...
Design and, in particular, design-research, is able to create the right conditions to engage resilient processes. In this chapter, we will present research projects that have used design strategies to reach different goals—from the development of business and strategic ideas, to the improvement of the quality of life of a neighbourhood. Many intang...
Politecnico di Milano Coltivando is a convivial garden where people meet, experiment, cultivate crops and share their skills and ideas. Coltivando uses innovative service and spatial design knowledge and community consultation processes. Coltivando is a design research project that is documented throughout its entire process. It is also a social as...
As cities organizations are facing major urban and technological transformations, European citizens are taking possession of their cities, collaborating or acting for its the renewal . Which kind of tool are set up to think and produce the public space together ? How to make these bottom-up initiatives sustainable ?
Human Cities_Challenging the Cit...
This paper explores the relationship between service design and the design of physical environments through the contributions received in “Experiencing and shaping” track at the “ServDes.2018 Proof of Concept” Conference. The main aim of the track is to examine how the systemic logic of service design and its peculiar focus on interactions influenc...
The paper is a position paper attempting to frame the foundations of an emerging topic in design research, education and practice: a transdisciplinary approach defined here as Service+Spatial design. Starting from the insights acquired by the authors through basic research and educational activities exploring the mutual influences between Spatial d...
Health is not only an individual or personal issue but a social related outcome co-created by a wide range of stakeholders. As public health challenge is proved to be a social issue, design service to promote social innovation could be an effective approach for health-empowered society. In China, designers co-created innovative service with stakeho...
The aim of this paper is to illustrate the design process and output of “GIDE Milano 2015”, a yearly international event for BSc design students and instructors held at the Politecnico di Milano Design School. The paper will focus on how design schools are moving towards educational process models based on “teaching-in-the-field” and peer teaching....
This chapter is a reflection on the use of public spaces in towns and the development of a system-events toolbox to make them places of social cohesion. It is the result of a 3-year action research developed together with POLIMI DESIS Lab of the Department of Design to develop design solutions to open up the public spaces of the campus to its surro...
Since resilience is identified as the capacity of communities and institutions to manage environmental, economic and social urgencies in a good and innovative way, design research and actions create the right conditions to engage resilient processes. This paper is about the critical readings of some research projects developed at the Design Departm...
http://www.padjournal.net/
This paper aims at gaining insights and reasoning on social innovation-based experimentations developed within the research project “campUS. Incubation and settings for social practices” – at the Politecnico di Milano. The project is acting for a virtuous relation between university spaces and competence, and the local c...
This paper describes how the co-design approach can facilitate the development of new community gardens in an urban context by using the “campUS” research project of the Politecnico di Milano. This is the second stage of a complex and structured path that started four years ago with the creation of Coltivando—the convivial garden at the Politecnico...
With the development of service economy, some companies enter new service business such as tourism, culture or leisure industry. Traditional companies then become a product-service complex which works in a product service system.
Yangshan Peach is a traditional brand of agricultural products company group in China. Under the development in recent y...
“C’è spazio per tutti/There’s room for one more” is an event that took place in November 2011 at the Milano Bovisa Durando campus of Politecnico di Milano, Italy with the purpose of opening up the public spaces of the university to the inhabitants of that area through a series of design actions to offer opportunities for understanding, observation...
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Currently the social integration between East and West is controversial and the hemisphere relating to exchange students is even more. This paper intends to address this issue by studying the use of everyday spaces and social integration in the context of Beijing, specifcally on the campus of Tsinghua University. It outlines a possible model that f...
This paper is about a design proposal for the “Style Council” (Xishan Style Council is local government department which take charge of organizing cultural and fitness activities. http:// wt. jsxishan. gov. cn/ zgxswtj/ .) of Xishan, Wuxi, China to offer a service which help the residents, especially the elders, to do fitness in a healthy and socia...
This paper reports co-design interventions with a rural community of practice at Inner Mongolia, who are keepers of a vernacular architecture practice dated back to 2000BC. The research aims to explore a social innovation model to achieve sustainable village regeneration in China. We report four days community engagements with tools and activities...
“Il Sabato della Bovisa” è un appuntamento mensile presso il Campus Bovisa Durando che
presenta una serie di iniziative per capire, osservare e far fruire uno spazio pubblico
universitario alla cittadinanza innescando un processo di scambio di conoscenze tra abitanti e
studenti in un clima di convivialità. Tour guidati e partecipativi, book sharing...
This paper presents and discusses an in-progress action format developed through a reflection on several design experiments aiming to make things happen. It brings to the already rich debate on social innovation a designer’s perspective mainly focused on action research and field actions.
It is an action format of design for social innovation, the...
conference proceedings is the property of the author(s). Permission is granted to reproduce copies of these works for purposes relevant to the above conference, provided that the author(s), source and copyright notice are included on each copy. For other uses, including extended quotation, please contact the author(s). Abstract 'Coltivando' is the...
The city of Milan will host the EXPO in 2015 with the theme “Feeding the planet. Energy for life”. The period of time separating us from the event is generating the creation of a community which in many ways feels part of the advent of Expo 2015, “looking forward”, for example, with growing interest and curiosity to the event, “participating” in it...
We live in towns in a daily, sometimes instantaneous, transformation. Cities that try to be innovative by bottom up initiatives where spatial and service designers act as facilitators of processes. Their temporary urban solutions generate urban scenarios, create places, interact with a city actress in a daily spectacle, here presented.
The Politecnico di Milano community garden ‘COLTIVANDO’ has been developing for over 12
months, in the Design department INDACO of Politecnico di Milano. The COLTIVANO
project is inspired by the Creative Communities movement, as we recognize the power of a
community garden to act as a mobaliser to respond to various sustainability problems that cro...
The “environmental fiction” that Andrea Branzi (Branzi, 2006) defines as “superstructural and transient” invades the city within a fixed time, with buildings as ephemeral spaces, furnished temporary features, temporary installations and events for a period shorter or longer, provoking emotions, consent, dissent, alternative uses of space stressing...
The paper discusses the methods for the planning of temporary accommodation operations following natural emergencies in a diversified territorial setting (Piedmont, Italy). The research was carried out by Turin Polytechnic and the Piedmont Region and focuses on the prevention aspects. The output of the research is a pilot project with proposed cons...
The conjunction ‘urban + interior’ brings together two conditions which are often posed as dichotomies. Here rather than a relation of either/or – either interior or urban – the relation is one of addition, of putting together in a propositional manner. Making relations between interior and urban is not new, and especially not in the discourse of i...
Questions
Question (1)
I am looking for best practices about how the neighborhood could be involved with (public) university campus facilities such as using the green areas as community garden or urban farming. I started a community garden in Politecnico di Milano campus two years ago as a result of a research project involving the design students and the community in a co-design process and then in co-managing and I am wondering if there are any other projects like this in other international universities.
