Il tema della velocità

La sicurezza del traffico stradale - vale a dire la circolazione sicura dei veicoli su strada - dipende da molti fattori che riguardano il veicolo, la strada e l’ambiente circostante, ma soprattutto il guidatore. Gli aspetti riguardanti le velocità di marcia dei singoli veicoli e dei flussi di traffico nel loro complesso assumono importanza determinante nella valutazione razionale della sicurezza. Il contenimento delle velocità costituisce, da sempre, un tema di grande interesse ma anche di significativa difficoltà, poiché si tratta di un fattore primariamente affidato alla componente meno “controllabile” del sistema stradale, ossia quella umana. Le politiche di prevenzione devono essere impostate e attuate congiuntamente da tutti gli attori del sistema, al fine di rendere comprensibile l’esigenza di comportamenti “sicuri”, per mezzo di opportune azioni educative, e per favorire la conoscenza di alcuni aspetti tecnici che, pur a distanza di molti decenni dallo sviluppo della motorizzazione di massa, risultano tuttora sostanzialmente ignorati o, peggio, falsati da informazioni fuorvianti o contraddittorie

Improvement of Portable Concrete Barriers using Computational Mechanics

Concrete safety barriers have been employed broadly in Italy since the 1980s, particularly on highways and freeways. Safety barrier homologation and design standards have not yet precisely determined specific fields of application or modality of installation, in particular for concrete barriers. Such barriers have sometimes been judged too rigid and, therefore, inadequate to pass crash tests conducted with lightweight vehicles. No changes have been made nor have new designs (crosssection shape and size) been developed in the past 20 years. For all those reasons, the possibility of achieving better overall performance with concrete barriers has been investigated (containment of heavy vehicles and lower accelerations on occupants of lightweight vehicles). One design proposal for these modular systems is to use lightweight concrete and make the element shorter than the one that is usually adopted in Italy. In that way, the higher lateral deformability of the barrier could lead to a greater dissipation of energy, with a resulting decrease in the dynamic effects for users, maintaining a good containment capability in the high-energy crash tests. In this paper, this new design is evaluated with virtual crash tests carried out with LS-DYNA, a finite element code. The model has been previously validated by comparing results of an actual crash test (using the existing Italian concrete barrier design) with the virtual crash test performed under the same conditions

Listening design: a new methodology for design and innovation processes

The aim of the paper is to describe a design methodology in the area of innovation design highlighting the importance of sharing strategies, methods and listening practices to be implemented at specific stages in the project's development. The ability of creative systems to generate product or process innovation and to integrate creativity and know-how in the products is the necessary condition to promote design activities and the following competitive dynamics able to meet the needs of the ever-changing world of consumption. The presence of universities, defined as “engines of innovation” (Florida et al. 2002), in complex production territories can establish close links between local development and intellectual capital and generate innovation processes. The interaction of and exchange between different competencies (universities, enterprises, institutions, users) makes up the environment where to formulate, share, design and test the demand for research-led innovation. Starting from the Design Thinking approach, the paper puts forward a methodology for the development of activities that may generate innovation, giving a crucial role to the "open listening" stage meant as the experimentation of an open, equal listening model provided with specific tools