Cities in transformation Research & Design

Cities in transformation Research & Design

EAAE / ARCC International Conference on Architectural Research

POL I T E CNI CO DI MI L ANO

7. Education in Architecture

Summary John Brennan,

University of Edinburgh , UK

Bing Chen

Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, UK

Mike Christenson

North Dakota State University,ND, US

John Comazzi - Jim Lutz University of Minnesota, MN, USA

Alessandra Como

Università degli studi di Salerno, Italy

James Eckler

Marywood University, PA, US

1 2 3 4 5 6

Karl Wallick

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Han Linfei

Beijing Jiaotong University, China

Politecnico di Bari, Italy

Dirk Janssen - Katrijn Apostel Artesis, Belgium

Yvonne Knevels

PHL Provinciale Hogeschool Limburg, Belgium

Pasquale Miano - Giorgia Aquilar Universita’ di Napoli “ Federico II “ , Italy

Ulrike Passe - Robert Demel Iowa State University, IA, USA

Andrzej Piotrowski

University of Minnesota, MN, USA

Barbara Cadeddu - Valeria Piazza - Patrizia Sulis

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Roberto de Paolis - Marinella Ferrara - Danilo Morigi

Matteo Ieva

7 8

University of Cagliari, Italy

Federica Visconti - Renato Capozzi Universita’ di Napoli “ Federico II “ , Italy

Ariadni Vozani

National Technical University of Athens, Greece

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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Roberto de Paolis - Marinella Ferrara - Danilo Morigi Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Happiness in the city. Experimental teaching and research in the methodological design of the collective space of the city

influencing the relationships between the place and the individual, between the individual and the community. Together, these microstructures create an independent urban local quality that is self-representative, experiential, often functionally dominant and memorable in the minds of citizens compared to architectural boxes. The object scale is, in fact, closer to everyday reality. The ability to determine the quality of the “micro-climate” is often considered more important than the form of buildings (Price, 60s)1. The experience of sensory materials, colors, textures, decoraIntroduction tions, lights, smells, and sounds defines the quality of spaces. This paper presents the results of the teaching experience con- In the approach of design, places are considered “significant poducted in the Bachelor Degree Course in Industrial Design of Poli- tential spaces,” in which personal experience is essential. tecnico di Milano based in Como, on the theme “Happiness in the Therefore even the iconic value of solutions gains importance. city”, with the goal of designing “Street furniture solutions for the outdoor areas of the city of Como”. The course has allowed us to Tools of the Design Approach experience a teaching methodology, which is capable to trigger a process of design that, using trans-disciplinary tools and me- We must also consider the need for the design activity to keep thods (urban, sociological and anthropological analysis, scenario cross-connections with other disciplines. Designers are looking design, etc.), becoming a catalyst for social participation by focu- for items that can stimulate the transversal comprehension of sing on users and their needs, either expressed or unexpressed. the project culture in order to elaborate ideas that go beyond The focus was set on different scales of design, from urban merely technical, aesthetic and formal solutions. John Thackara to object, from landscape to the enhancement of cultural and briefly expressed this need: “In a less-stuff-more-people-world environmental communication strategies and the definition of we still need systems, platforms, and services that enable people perception and enjoyment of the environment. In all this we in- to interact more efficiently and enjoyable. These platforms and cluded all the elements that determine the functional, relational, infrastructures will require some technology and a lot of design”2. expressive and communicative quality of the spaces and, with Interdisciplinary relationships are needed to explore and underreference to the contemporary needs of requiring mediation stand, to affect and alter, the variety of relationships to which the between local identity and global languages. Together, these projects relate. The next section will address this. factors help characterize the sites, to define identity and recognition of spaces and to improve the quality of people’s life who Social Engineering / Cultural Engineering3 daily enjoy the collective areas of the cities. Cultural engineering is a research method that uses the activation of trans-disciplinary resources and intermediation capacity Features of the Design Approach to Urban Projects in order to configure a broad view of design solutions that reWith reference to some thoughts by design theorist Andrea spond to communication strategies of wide range interactions Branzi, we would like to share a few interesting concepts in or- with the user, including the deep links between planning, polider to understand the design approach to urban space, and to tics, cultural and social issues. consider possible intervention synergies at different scales (city, According to this method, one must provide for the unexpected consequences of the design because any project will always building, object). The difference between architecture and design is structural and have side effects. For this reason, designers and planners must is explained by their unique spatial strategies and relationships consider the implicit and explicit interests of the people involved (and invested capital) and understand the appropriate way with humans. The design approach to a project for a city is characterized by re- to express such interest in the project. Professionals are wellading the urban area, giving central importance to users and local advised to adopt a way of thinking related to social systems human activities, to detect the specific aspects of these activities rather than to objects or specific products, according to a vision of services with a participating nature. and, at the same time, quality issues inside urban complexity. Essential activities to this approach are: - map local inner resources (physical elements like architecture, natural elements, infrastructures, routes, transportations, productive and social resources and also immaterial resources like local cultures and stories); - read the characteristics of the community in terms of who is settling in and living in the urban area (their lifestyle, traditions, behavior and shared values); - study relationships and processes between social and individual, all of which characterize the life of the city as a complex and dynamic organism. For architecture, thinking starts from a defined area from which a project is developed and accomplished, by dialoguing along the way with the surroundings on the basis of an intention and a single construction program; design starts from a complex conception defining punctual and widespread microstructures, which can be transformed or removed, properly or improperly used. The intervention of design comes out as a “weak plan” (Branzi, 2010), i.e. a project of micro-systems able to reformulate the context by starting from mass behavior, activating networks of resources, emerging technologies and distribution of potential creative solutions. This method meets contemporary operational modes and thoughts, characterized by a pattern of “weak and diffused modernity”, where the project searches for reversible structures, blurred limits and incomplete ways, which correspond to the logic of a society committed to reforming and developing new rules, regulations and statutes so as to tackle a state of perpetual crisis, responding to a strategy of continuous innovation, leaving definitive structures for moving to reversible flexibility. Often design microstructures, also named “swarms of objects”, are not the result of a global plan, but rather the result of the localization of specific actions distributed in the urban space,

Ethnography for Design In the approach to design, urban design is located in an area of intersection between industrial production and the end user. The design requires the skills and ability to translate culture, needs, and behaviors and to transfer these interpretations into industrial offers. These capabilities are often implemented with the support of ethnographic methods and sociological reflection. The ethnographic contribution is crucial when focusing on the key points of the definition of sustainable consumption and production of new services offering new scenarios and lifestyles, and to support the horizontal networks of collaboration between individuals at the local level (Morelli, 2011). In the ethnographic approach, humans are at the heart of the projects, not as one factor among others in a broader context. Psychogeography Psychogeography is a survey methodology for urban spaces experimented in the early 50’s by the movement of Lettristi defined as “the study of the precise effects of geographical environment, laid out consciously or not, which acts directly on the affective behavior of individuals”4. It is a method for the deconstruction of the urban areas, which highlights the relationship between urban environment and the human experience by studying the correlations between psyche and environment for creative re-definition of urban spaces. Viewing Scenarios Among the typical tools of design, arising from the different areas in which design operates, one in particular has been used in the methodology adopted for the course “Happiness in the

City”: viewing design scenarios. This tool has allowed us to collect and display all information collected by the methods previously described. The purpose of scenario design is to define, structure and set the project goal. It is preceded by a phase of context analysis, including information collection, which gives shape and scale of the intervention, defining at the same time actors and values in the physical and social space in which a project is undertaken. This becomes even more complex when working on an urban scale, in a situation where the number of factors and actors involved is considerable and is therefore influenced by the behavior and social action of the community. In our project, information was taken directly from the main places involved in the design process, through different levels of analysis, measurements, photos, and video footage, in order to collect the most accurate and direct information, whether overt or hidden, offered by the spaces of the city. This led to a clear and direct representation of the environment in which future products or services will find a precise context. The research project used interviews and field experiences, which are more valid and current, with no intermediary between users and designers of space. This phase of the investigation ended with the definition of scenarios; the team found a way to develop, reconcile, and make sense of the signs, customs, and paths of actors who live in everyday urban spaces. Through careful analysis of the various entities that use urban spaces, their origins, their habits, and their cultures, the designer is able to identify, extract, and refine ideas, concepts, and images of what might be a different relationship to space, resulting in a change of behavior. By understanding the scope of the design characteristics and the context in which it operates, the next step was the definition of values, concepts, and possible addresses for the development of strategies and products. The decoding of a rebuilt reality led to the vision of solutions, products, projects, services, giving shape to possible, if not plausible, worlds, in which the central position is occupied by the end user, the figure that gives meaning and value to results of the creative process. Design Process and Methodology in an Urban Context: Projects for Como The learning experience created and studied by the authors focused on furniture design elements and systems for the city of Como, developed and conducted in one semester in the Laboratory of Final Synthesis. Participating students were in their third year of a bachelor’s degree program in furniture design at the Como campus. The working hypothesis was to verify how urban design, through the system of objects, can help to generate new meanings in the space of the city, and to create wealth and improve the quality of life through human relationships. The size and detail of an object are essential components of design strategies aimed at elevating the perceived value of “anthropic” space and its impact on the natural environment, which is increasingly oriented to sustainability and the mindful use of energy resources. The didactic intent was to transfer the awareness of context-targeted planning to students involved in a design laboratory that we might call “situated design,” so that they become attentive to peculiarities of a specific site, context, or landscape, while introducing their morphological, typological, and technological determinations. The design process has been split into three phases: pre-project analysis and research; scenario and meta-project; project development. The first phase of analysis and pre-research students made was carried out in the field with the aim of acquiring state information and identifying critical situations in the urban environment. Methods included combining the classic tools of detection and mapping with those typical of the multifactorial social analysis, such as interviews with users, identification of the target, and the use of videos, polls, social networks, and focus groups. The data results have been restated using SWOT analysis methods, identifying, for each field analyzed, strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities.

(e.g., fashion, graphics, product, arts, transportation, mobility, food, leisure, entertainment, youth culture, sports, etc..) 3. Study of best practices in urban areas where the designoriented approach is more developed 4. Analysis of ergonomic requirements for use of products, usercentered design, and ethnographic studies 5. Metadesign identifying the needs of consumers and endusers (target); gathering information from the trade publications; performing analysis of, and benchmarking to, competitors; analysis by type and sector of products, processes, and technologies used in the production of materials, semi-finished products, components, and finishing processes; reconstructing evolutionary genealogies of systems of objects; analyzing the technology opportunity and manufacturing within the Como area (i.e., traditional areas of textiles, wood, and furniture); analyzing the supply system. At the end of the analysis phase, all the gathered information gathered iswas served used to formulate the project brief, which outlined that led to the requirements on which the groups have used to begin developing different scenarios reference and references, articulated around the following themes: a) increase and expand of tourism actractivity in the city; b) encourage an interactive city: by making it a place to meet, socialize, and integrationintegrate; c) re-appropriation of public space, to remedy desolation of open space; d) use of facilities and environmentally sustainable energy; e) enhance and strengthening connections between the urban space and the Como’s lake and rivers; f) upgrade of existing buildings and monuments at lakefront, both historical and modern (the neo-classical and the “city of Rationalism”); g) restore of brownfield sites: to reconnecting existing urban voids with boroughs; h) reorganize of relaxing space by creating the perception of natural landscape; i) provide housing infrastructure for the homeless people; j) reorganize of mobility with to produce low environmental impact (e.g., shared transportation) In the last phase, which was dedicated to the project development and product engineering, the students have worked individually, starting with concepts developed by the group, and created project proposals coming to address detailed design and developing models for studying the proposed works. The project outcomes have produced a typological variety, which is difficult attributable to categorize in a singular fashion, thereby confirming the fact that, even when as it is adopted using a standard methodology in project design, the diversity of places and contexts, combined with diverse student talents and interested, produces multiple nuanced interpretations.

In summary, the results of the project (the proposed interventions) can be organized in the following way of intervention corresponding to the areas: 1. Create green areas in Piazza Cavour, and benches, with play morphologically articulated in space, kiosks, tourist information points, and lighting and info-panels powered by photovoltaic panels; 2. Refurbish the walk to Villa Olmo refurbished with seats that are convertible by users, station points for artists and landscape architects, memory fountains for the trades and labor, employuseing membranes shelters and shape memory metal, and create walk viable walking alternatives to rafts on the water with areas for stops and recollection; 3. Redesign of the Porta Torre with structures that enhance ethnic and social integration, create shelters for waiting for buses, light equipment to facilitate the integration of homeless and disadvantaged consumers; 4. Varese avenue marked bywith archways framed with a tensile structure arc, reminiscent of the “arches” of the Roman city, and picnic tables facing the users of the nearby elementary schools; 5. Equip lakeside gardens and monumental area equipped with workstations featuring interactive projections on custom facades, “bubble-temporary space” for young people to socialize meeting, fitness trails, and outdoor gym or fitness space outdoors; In summary, the analysis phase was divided into five major com- 6. Castle Baradello and the surrounding hills, systems observaponents: tion of individual shots of landscape and cityscape 1. Analysis of the urban environment, land, and environmental 7. Redevelopment of the ex-former Ticosa factory with a seating 2. Study of trends in the medium and long term relating to the system so it can be used as a skate park, sitting / rickshaw with European design individual quiet space, for self-study, banners inspired by urban

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Roberto de Paolis - Marinella Ferrara - Danilo Morigi Politecnico di Milano, Italy

graffiti, textile attached to beams, benches with integrated lamp shade, and heated wooden seats; 8. Verdi Square with integrated shelters / and seats, designing include a product-service of bike-sharing service, corporate image re-design, benches with idrochromical graphics, and recharging points of portable electronic devices; 9. Convert Piazza del Popolo and the residual green spaces into an open-air multi-sensory, experiential water museum; 10. Enhance the banks and pedestrian walkways along the Cosia River and student residences near the university’s campus, and include a constellation of lighting and rotating lighted watermills. Educational experimentation has produced a new generation of items and furniture systems designed to meet the emerging social needs of citizens and respond to renewed interest in aesthetic appreciation, communication, and relational experiences of contemporary life. Conclusion Didactic experimentation proposed hereby shows some peculiar elements. First of all the field of intervention: the collective space of the city was selected primarily because of its rich of layers of historically consolidated meaning, and, secondly, because the space is particularly susceptible to multidisciplinary and multimodal approaches to design, a typical feature of contemporary design disciplines. A specialist sectorial approach would be limited to the scope of the product-process-communication-consumption cycle, but an open mode, supported by a “cross fertilization” between multiple influences from the fields of sociology, cultural and communicational processes, and from the diffusion of social practices induced by social networks, which have undergone unprecedented transformations in urban space evolution, languages, forms, and modes of use. Another peculiarity is the concept of “situated design”. In fact, even though for more than two centuries industrial design - as a science of the artificial aimed at optimizing production, in a perspective in which project, process and product were not connected to the places and contexts because of replicable industrial scale - nowadays design tends to take the territorial dimension of the project as an opportunity and a responsibility in the specificity of the “genius loci”, contextualized in the relationships with the local and urban environment. The project will integrate the design of objects to some outdoor actions that are intended to involve citizens in a contemporary reinterpretation of participation in the destiny and in the development of urban environments with actions denouncing the most urgent problems. The resulted projects are new concepts of metropolitan objects and devices declined in the systemic urban-scale. Those products become signs in the territory conveying the identity of places, on the one hand improving the characteristics of the specific context, on the other hand taking into account the need to relate of people and the request of aesthetic fruition of places in contemporary living. All inspired by the potential of new sustainable technologies and by the local productive resources that are specific expressions of that territory.

Notes Sul pensiero di Cedric Price: H. Ulrich Olbrist, Re:CP Cedric Price, Lettera Ventidue, Siracusa, 2011. 2 Thackara J., In the Bubble. Designing in a complex world, Cambridge, 2005, p.4. 3 For the concept of cultural engineering, see: Höger H., Cultural engineering: il design come progetto globale, in Höger H., Design education, editrice Abitare Segesta, Milano, 2006, pp. 141-148. 4 Definition appeared in the first issue of the Bulletin of the Situationist International, published in 1958. See Wikipedia http:// it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psicogeografia. 1

Flag course image

Legenda 00. Flag course image 01, 02 and 03. Analysis Board (design by Matteo Mugnai, Mauro Pocobelli, Giuseppe Rizzato, Virginia Vivaldi) 04. and 05. Analysis Board (design by Federica Roverato, Francesca Pizzi, Valentina Tomezzoli, Matthieu Rogeaux) 06. Process design Board (design by Federica Roverato, Francesca Pizzi, Valentina Tomezzoli, Matthieu Rogeaux) 07. Conceptual map (design by Giulia Salvadori, Eleonora Monzani, Paola Maggi, Alessandro Triglia) 08. An outlook on the projects developed within the course (design by Luca Mazza, Mathieu Rogeaux, Qing Wang, Davide Oriani, Laura Vassena) 09. An outlook on the projects developed within the course ( design by Pegah Janghorban, Paola Maggi, Davide Santambrogio, Giuseppe Rizzato, Alessandro Triglia) Bibliography

Analysis board (design by M. Mugnai, M. Pocobelli, G. Rizzato, V. Vivaldi)

Process Design Board (design by F. Roverato, F. Pizzi, V. Tomezzoli, M. Rougeaux)

Branzi A., Ritratti e autoritratti di design, Marsilio, Venezia, 2010. Process Design Board (design by F. Roverato, F. Pizzi, V. Tomezzoli, M. Rougeaux)

Carrol J.M., Scenario Based Design, Addison Wyley, New York, 1995. Cibic A., Rethinking happiness, Ed. Corraini, Mantova, 2010. Höger H., Cultural engineering: il design come progetto globale, in Höger H., Design education, editrice Abitare Segesta, Milano, 2006. Morelli N., Active, local, connected: Strategic and methodological insights in three cases, in «Design Issues», n. 27, 2011. Olbrist U., Re: CP Cedric Price, Lettera Ventidue, Siracusa, 2011. Thackara J., In the Bubble. Designing in a complex world, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005. Vazquez D., Manuale di Psicogeografia, Ed. Nerosubianco, Cuneo, 2010.


Process Design Board (design by F. Roverato, F. Pizzi, V. Tomezzoli, M. Rougeaux)

Conceptual Map (design by G. Salvadori, E. Monzani, P. Maggi, A. Triglia)
