I’m very happy to say that a Design Research Initiative that influenced me very much during the development of my thesis has been selected among the finalist projects for the most important Italian Design Award.

EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) was a programme of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of [...]

Tags: Community, Design, Design Research, Italy, Locality, Participation, Social Innovation, Sustainability

During the last six months I have been honoured to work as the administrator of the website, newsletter and blog of the Changing the Change conference, which will be held in Turin on 10th-11th-12th of July 2008:
http://www.changingthechange.org
This conference will be an international social event dedicated to study how design (and especially design research) could help [...]

Tags: Design Research, Internet, Italy, Sustainability, University

Thanks to Stefano Mizzella, we have an interview with Gianandrea Giacoma about Sci(bzaar)net (in Italian) that summarizes the event’s main themes and conclusions. The interview can be found on the last number of 7thfloor magazine and here on Scribd:

Tags: Internet, Italy, Science, University

A very short report from Sci(bzaar)net, one week later.
First of all, thanks to Gian for this opportunity offered me. Participating in the organization process (even if only online, building the event’s website) and at the event was an opportunity to learn a lot about how we can make room for an open dialogue between very [...]

Tags: Crowdfunding, Design Research, Institutions, Italy, Knowledge, Open Culture, Science, Technology, Web 2.0

I’m very happy to give you two important announcements…I will participate in two important events that are a mix of a conference and a more informal event like BarCamps: one will be held in Italy, and the other one in Spain. In this post I will talk about the first one.
I have been invited to [...]

Tags: Information Society, Italy, Open Culture, Open P2P Communities, Science

I found on designboom some very nice reports from the Toshare Festival. As designboom publish its contents under copyright, I can’t republish them but just publish the links (blogs were born as a solution for link sharing).
Here are the links for the share prize exhibition and especially the manufacturing (divided in 1, 2, 3 [...]

Tags: Italy, Technology

Back from Toshare.it, where I saw some interesting projects and met very interesting persons…
From there, I’d like to suggest you a project that shows how design could get inspiration from complexity. This is maybe the first step a designer could take confronting complexity, and therefore projects like this are not only fascinating but also promising [...]

Tags: Architectural Design, Complexity, Design, Emergence, Interaction Design, Italy, Movie Design, Realtime, Self-Organization, Swarm / Flock / Crowd