lecture #1 at alta scuola politecnica workshop in belgirate, may 2014. here we frame the week.

1. community services for milan of expo 2015.
designing a community-based service to better navigate the transforming city of today (and tomorrow)
or: what are we going to do this week?
alta scuola politecnica
spring school 2014
stefano mirti,
belgirate, may 2014

2. before to start,
to frame the theme,
i would like you to check these three links.
they refer to watch the videos related to three projects i worked at in the past (or now):
- design 101 (or, design basics)
- torino geodesign
- social media for Expo 2015

3. design 101, technically speaking, is a MOOC (massive on-line
open course).
regarding our interests, design 101 is an experiment in terms
of “service design”.
the question it poses are several. let’s start with three of
them:
- is it possible to imagine knowledge dissemination (aka
school), processed in a completely different way?
- can you organize a class in the same way you would
organize a community?
- can you overlap the digital and the physical world?
design 101 for iversity

4. torino geodesign was an interesting project
we did in 2008: 50 communities, 50
designers, 50 companies.
inventing and imagining new products and
new services for themselves and for the city.
a completely different way to look at the
design process.
here you have the link to the website
here you have the link to the essay: the people of a city
here you have the link to the essay: a ‘how-to’ guide (or:
the cultural event in the age of technical reproducibility

5. the third example is the social media work
we are doing for Expo 2015.
again, it is a community based project.
how to network together the hundreds (thousand) communities and people spinning around
Expo 2015.
here you have the link to the web aggregator

6. now we can start to write down some keywords useful for our work:
community of practice
need / desire
community-based
bottom-up (as opposed to top-down)
material / immaterial
digital / physical

7. here some other links,
helping us to focus even more on what we’ll do
this week:
- adotta una pecora (adopt a sheep)
- lulu and the book on demand concept
- gnammo (the social restaurant)
- restaurant day
- airbnb

8. one more thing:
be visionary!

9. another (very important) thing:
don’t make easy and simple assumptions in terms of medium and media.
be sharp on this part of your work:
challenge given rules and habits.
imagine new uses, hacks, hybridizations.
ask yourself: “what if?”
here a link for you to chek:
the medieval helpdesk
(you see what i mean?)

10. another thing we like very much, is: “critical design”.
wikipedia gives us this definition:
a critical design will often challenge its audience's precon
and expectations thereby provoking
new ways of thinking about the object, its use, and
the surrounding environment.
critical designers generally believe design that
provokes, inspires, makes us think, and questions
fundamental assumptions can make a valuable
contribution to debates about the role technology
plays in everyday life.
here the link

11. until now we’ve been talking about the theme.
now we can talk about the organization of our workshop.
what are our parameters of success,
how we will work,
and what are you supposed to work at during the week.
1. parameters of success
2. how we work
3. what we will do during the week

12. parameters of success:
- to improve your professional
network (colleagues, tutors,
teachers, guests)
- to learn how to make a project
(in a short time), with people you
are not familiar with
- to be able to transfer the inputs
you get this week into other
projects / activities of yours
- together with your team, you
produce an interesting prototype

13. very important!
design is about the process
first you design the process,
then you get the (final) product
this week, the challenge is to shape a good process,
focus on the process and the final product will come out (hopefully)

14. how we work:
1. we work in team, each team has 5 people
2. the teams are set (you don’t decide who are
your teammates)
3. in each team there are people with different
skills
4. later on today we give you the team list
we know quite well that this looks like a nightmare.
but real life is a nightmare, hence this has a quite
good educational value.
how to deal with unknown people, with a different
mindset: this is part of the design challenge.
how to get the best of every person in the team,
this is another bit of the challenge.
don’t forget:
if your team fail, you can’t succeed.
but then (horrendously), if your team succeed,
you still can fail (it sounds unfair, it is actually unfair).

15. most important challenge:
make different people
striving for a common goal

16. life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well
robert louis stevenson
this applies to life, as well as to group work

17. what do we do this week?
day 1 (today): it’s about documentation and finding
examples, inspiration, case-studies.
brainstorming and mind-mapping.
go broad.
day 2 (wed): it’s about shaping up your idea.
choose one direction and start to get the whole
concept set. from the general to details (and
viceversa).
go deep.
day 3 (thu): it’s about checking what are people are
doing (can you improve your thing?).
then, finalizing your project.
day 4 (fri): presenting.
that’s it.
it was short, wasn’it?

18. don’t forget a very relevant fact:
design process goes in
loops and recursion

19. foryourcommunity.it

20. thank you for your attention, i hope the whole thing was clear and you know what to do
stefano mirti, belgirate, 6th of may 2014
@stefi_idlab on twitter and instagram
stefano mirti on facebook