O papel estratégico do design: o caso italiano

Almost all the histories of Italian design tell us that design culture was born in a close relation between professionals and SMEs. Looking at this relation, we can read the story of the relation between design and strategy from a pretty peculiar perspective. Starting from those sectors today we would normally call “design-oriented”, Italian SMEs historically develop a symbiotic relationship with design, which becomes the engine of innovation: a driver which gives the opportunity to build their identity, and emerge in the domestic and in the international markets. This relation is almost always characterized by a direct link between entrepreneur and designer, in which the designer is not only asked to give shape to ideas, but rather to understand and interpret the needs, to anticipate desires, to build a “frame of meaning” around the market offer. The Italian entrepreneur is used to discuss with the designer the development of new products, defining market opportunities, and the possible solutions. In an under-structured context, where marketing (and for sure strategic marketing) is still missing, design plays a role of mediation in the relation between company and market, developing what we are used to call a strategic approach. In other words, in Italy design developed a strategic attitude from the very beginning, and did not become strategic after the meeting with marketing. The framework in which this happens is very particular: the entrepreneur usually operates within a confined space (the industrial cluster) in which his motivation to emerge is mainly linked to social legitimacy. This framework – to quote Weber backwards – builds a tension towards the creation of “beautiful and well made products” rather than a tension towards profit, which explains why design comes before marketing. This entire story happened in Italy in the absence of a structured presence of design within the university, which initially is not a “visible” player within the system. Only the profound transformations of the competitive scenario generated, in relatively recent times, a need for a specifically targeted research and education system, leading to the fast development of the design-system inside the university. If we look at it today, looks like it has been there from the very beginning, while its pretty recent birth is a sign of a profound change, carrying the need of more conscious approaches to design. Key words: strategic design, design practice, SMEs, industrial clusters.Quase todas as histórias de design italiano nos dizem que a cultura do design nasceu em uma estreita relação entre os profissionais e as SMEs. Olhando para essa relação, podemos ler a história da relação entre a concepção e a estratégia a partir de uma perspectiva bastante peculiar. A partir de hoje, os setores que normalmente chamamos de “design-oriented”, o italiano SMEs historicamente desenvolve uma relação simbiótica com a concepção, que passa a ser o motor da inovação: guiando o design para construir sua identidade, e emerge no mercado interno e nos mercados internacionais. Esta relação é quase sempre caracterizada por uma relação direta entre empresário e designer, em que o criador não é só solicitado para dar forma às ideias, mas sim para compreender e interpretar as necessidades, a fi m de antecipar desejos, para construir um “quadro de significado” sobre a oferta do mercado. O empresário italiano é usado para discutir com o criador do desenvolvimento de novos produtos, definindo oportunidades de mercado, e as possíveis soluções. Em um sub-contexto estruturado, onde marketing (marketing estratégico, com certeza) ainda está faltando, o design desempenha um papel de mediação na relação entre empresa e mercado, desenvolvendo aquilo que é utilizado para ligar com uma abordagem estratégica. Em outras palavras, na Itália a concepção estratégica é desenvolvida como uma atitude desde o início, e não se torna estratégica após a reunião com o marketing. O quadro em que isso acontece é muito especial: o empresário normalmente opera dentro de um espaço confinado (o cluster industrial) em que a sua motivação para emergir é principalmente ligada à legitimidade social, que – para citar Weber trás – conduz a uma tensão no sentido da criação de “bonito e produtos bem feitos”, em vez de tensão para o lucro, o que explica por que vem antes da concepção à comercialização. Toda esta história aconteceu na Itália, na ausência de uma presença estruturada de concepção no seio da universidade, que inicialmente não é um jogador “visível” dentro do sistema. Apenas as profundas transformações do cenário competitivo gerado, em tempos relativamente recentes, exigem a necessidade de uma investigação especifica mente orientada e sistema de ensino, levando ao rápido desenvolvimento da concepção do sistema a partir da universidade. Se olharmos hoje, parece que foi ali desde o início, enquanto o seu bonito recente nascimento é um sinal de uma mudança profunda, que transportam mais consciência da necessidade de abordagens de concepção. Palavras-chave: design estratégico, prática de design, SMEs, clusters industriais

O papel estratégico do design: o caso italiano

Almost all the histories of Italian design tell us that design culture was born in a close relation between professionals and SMEs. Looking at this relation, we can read the story of the relation between design and strategy from a pretty peculiar perspective. Starting from those sectors today we would normally call “design-oriented”, Italian SMEs historically develop a symbiotic relationship with design, which becomes the engine of innovation: a driver which gives the opportunity to build their identity, and emerge in the domestic and in the international markets. This relation is almost always characterized by a direct link between entrepreneur and designer, in which the designer is not only asked to give shape to ideas, but rather to understand and interpret the needs, to anticipate desires, to build a “frame of meaning” around the market offer. The Italian entrepreneur is used to discuss with the designer the development of new products, defining market opportunities, and the possible solutions. In an under-structured context, where marketing (and for sure strategic marketing) is still missing, design plays a role of mediation in the relation between company and market, developing what we are used to call a strategic approach. In other words, in Italy design developed a strategic attitude from the very beginning, and did not become strategic after the meeting with marketing. The framework in which this happens is very particular: the entrepreneur usually operates within a confined space (the industrial cluster) in which his motivation to emerge is mainly linked to social legitimacy. This framework – to quote Weber backwards – builds a tension towards the creation of “beautiful and well made products” rather than a tension towards profit, which explains why design comes before marketing. This entire story happened in Italy in the absence of a structured presence of design within the university, which initially is not a “visible” player within the system. Only the profound transformations of the competitive scenario generated, in relatively recent times, a need for a specifically targeted research and education system, leading to the fast development of the design-system inside the university. If we look at it today, looks like it has been there from the very beginning, while its pretty recent birth is a sign of a profound change, carrying the need of more conscious approaches to design. Key words: strategic design, design practice, SMEs, industrial clusters.Quase todas as histórias de design italiano nos dizem que a cultura do design nasceu em uma estreita relação entre os profissionais e as SMEs. Olhando para essa relação, podemos ler a história da relação entre a concepção e a estratégia a partir de uma perspectiva bastante peculiar. A partir de hoje, os setores que normalmente chamamos de “design-oriented”, o italiano SMEs historicamente desenvolve uma relação simbiótica com a concepção, que passa a ser o motor da inovação: guiando o design para construir sua identidade, e emerge no mercado interno e nos mercados internacionais. Esta relação é quase sempre caracterizada por uma relação direta entre empresário e designer, em que o criador não é só solicitado para dar forma às ideias, mas sim para compreender e interpretar as necessidades, a fi m de antecipar desejos, para construir um “quadro de significado” sobre a oferta do mercado. O empresário italiano é usado para discutir com o criador do desenvolvimento de novos produtos, definindo oportunidades de mercado, e as possíveis soluções. Em um sub-contexto estruturado, onde marketing (marketing estratégico, com certeza) ainda está faltando, o design desempenha um papel de mediação na relação entre empresa e mercado, desenvolvendo aquilo que é utilizado para ligar com uma abordagem estratégica. Em outras palavras, na Itália a concepção estratégica é desenvolvida como uma atitude desde o início, e não se torna estratégica após a reunião com o marketing. O quadro em que isso acontece é muito especial: o empresário normalmente opera dentro de um espaço confinado (o cluster industrial) em que a sua motivação para emergir é principalmente ligada à legitimidade social, que – para citar Weber trás – conduz a uma tensão no sentido da criação de “bonito e produtos bem feitos”, em vez de tensão para o lucro, o que explica por que vem antes da concepção à comercialização. Toda esta história aconteceu na Itália, na ausência de uma presença estruturada de concepção no seio da universidade, que inicialmente não é um jogador “visível” dentro do sistema. Apenas as profundas transformações do cenário competitivo gerado, em tempos relativamente recentes, exigem a necessidade de uma investigação especifica mente orientada e sistema de ensino, levando ao rápido desenvolvimento da concepção do sistema a partir da universidade. Se olharmos hoje, parece que foi ali desde o início, enquanto o seu bonito recente nascimento é um sinal de uma mudança profunda, que transportam mais consciência da necessidade de abordagens de concepção. Palavras-chave: design estratégico, prática de design, SMEs, clusters industriais

Exploring the interplay between urban governance and smart services codesign

The large spreading of e-democracy and e-participatory tools and environments showed, and is still showing, that technologies offer new direction for dealing with the challenge of scaling the deliberative democracy perspective up to the urban governance scale. The recent growth of Urban Living Labs and Human Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-scale of decision and the mechanisms of urban governance. In coherence with these perspectives, the article reports on the interplay between urban governance and the co-design of smart services in urban transformation as it has been observed and analysed in the two European research projects Periphèria and MyNeinghbourhood. The article also discusses the value of service codesign as a strategic practice to experiment new participatory governance in smart cities

Design and Social Innovation for the Development of Human Smart Cities

Urban transformation is widely recognized as a complex phenomenon, rich in uncertainty. It is the unpredictable consequence of complex interplay between urban forces (both top-down or bottom-up), urban resources (spatial, social, economic and infrastructural as well as political or cognitive) and transformation opportunities (endogenous or exogenous). The recent attention to Urban Living Lab and Human Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-scale environments and dynamics of such forces and resources and the urban governance mechanisms. This bridge is represented by those urban collaborative ecosystems, where processes of smart service co-design take place through dialogic interaction with and among citizens within a situated and cultural-specific frame. As a response to new emerging needs and ways of generating value, during the last decades the design discipline - traditionally bound to the development of tangible artefacts - has expanded its focus on intangible artefacts such as signs, interactions, processes, and services. In this framework design is orienting its theories and practices towards a different object, putting people at the centre of the smartness of cities by recognizing the need of developing sustainable, micro and contextualized solutions that could eventfully be scaled up to achieve larger social impacts (Murray, Caulier- Grice and Mulgan, 2010). The Human Smart City paradigm (Concilio, Deserti and Rizzo, 2014) relies on the capability of the cities to realize and scale up services more sustainable because collaborative in nature based on anthropocentric networks that support the emergence of new typologies of partnerships of actors interested to solve some unmet societal problem. The paper presents this vision by discussing the results of a long-term experimentation conducted in the city of Milano under the framework of the My Neighbourhood European project

Introducting Design Thinking in Social Innovation and in Public Sector: A design-based learning framework

Design Thinking (DT) is becoming a mantra in the different areas of innovation: including SI and public sector (Manzini and Rizzo, 2011; Deserti and Rizzo, 2015). Despite its large success DT is still applied in peripheral areas of public sector and SI where it is used as a methodology to conduct small scale experiments often supported by national and EU funds. This article focus on the interaction between DT, public sector innovation and SI from a twofold perspective: as an emergent trajectory of innovation in public sector; and as a framework on which to design processes of change in public organisations.The first line of research deals with the issue of how to produce new services in public sector SI inspired considering constraints like budget cut and the users’ expectations for high quality of delivery and interactions; the second one is putting attention on how to support capacity building in public sector in order to develop new competences to deal with innovation. The paper then reports a case conducted in the Municipality of Turin during which DT has been introduced as a design based learning framework to support employees to develop new competences by taking part in a service design project

Design and the cultures of enterprises

The paper is structured as follows: First, we briefly introduce the main currents of thought in organizational change studies, fur¬ther developing the connection between new product development and the need for change in the culture of the enterprise because of contradictions between the existing culture of the enterprise and the one needed to develop and exploit new products. Second, we examine how managerial practice is generally characterized by a type of reductionist thinking, in which methods, techniques, and tools are extracted from their original context and adopted along increasingly shorter lifecycles to manage organizational change. Such practice occurs even when the theories on organizational change are holistic and systematic. Next, we differentiate the notion of design culture from design thinking and discuss it in relation to enterprise culture. In this part, we express the idea that the products of an enterprise are not just the synthesis of the end user’s needs, but essentially are the synthesis of its culture. From this assumption, we hypothesize that the development of new products often generates or requires changes in the culture of the enterprise as a kind of “side effect” related to the novelty of the products (at least for this particular enterprise). To verify this hypothesis, we consider three cases: the Sony Playstation, the LEGO Mindstorm, and the strategic design division in 3M. The cases are discussed in the last part of the article, in which evidence in favor of design culture as an implicit agent of change is pro¬vided alongside some lessons learned from the study

Introducing Design Thinking in Social Innovation and in the Public Sector: a design based learning framework

Design Thinking (DT) is becoming a mantra in the different areas of innovation: including SI and Public sector (Manzini&Rizzo, 2011; Deserti&Rizzo, 2015). But despite its large success in literature, DT is still applied in peripheral areas of Public sector where it is in place as methodology to conduct research and innovation pilots. The article focus on the interaction between DT, public sector innovation and SI as both: an emergent trajectory of innovation in Public sector (that under the umbrella of the “co” paradigm puts together the need to develop complex co-design processes with the need to face public societal challenges) and as a framework for designing processes of learning within public organisation that could eventually lead to the introjection of new competences on how to lead innovation in public sector and ultimately to organisation change

Design and Innovation: How Many Ways?

Introduzione allo Special issue Design and Innovation: How Many Ways

Adjuvant treatment in biliary tract cancer

Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) are a heterogeneous group of malignancies with a dismal prognosis. Despite radical surgery, the five-year overall survival (OS) does not exceed 40% in the best series. Adjuvant treatments are widely used even though they have mainly been investigated in small retrospective series until recently. Available data suggest that chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil (and relative prodrugs) or gemcitabine can reduce the risk of relapse and potentially improve patients\u2019 long-term outcome. The role of adjuvant radiotherapy seems to be confined to patients with positive surgical margins. In addition, patients with highrisk factors for relapse (nodal involvement and non-radical resection) benefit most from chemotherapy. Recent results from large randomized trials have clarified the benefit of adjuvant treatments and probably defined a new standard of care