Systemic Design for the innovation of home appliances The meaningfulness of data in designing sustainable systems

This work addressed the domestic environment considering this context as a complex system characterised by significant impacts in terms of resource consumption. Within the theoretical framework of Systemic Design (SD), this thesis focused on home appliances, in order to understand how to reduce the impact directly attributable to them, while optimising and simplifying daily tasks for the user. A design methodology towards environmental sustainability has been structured, by focusing on the use of data for design purposes and on creating value for the user through meaningful products. It considers the user, the product and the environment as central topics, by giving them the same relevance and the literature review is structured accordingly, investigating needs and requirements, ethical issues, but also current products and future scenarios. During my experience at TU Delft, I spent six months in the Department of Internet of Things at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Together with computer scientists, we developed a prototype to collect some missing data, establishing the importance of grounding the decision-making on reliable information. IoT and data gathering open a variety of possibilities in monitoring, accessing more precise knowledge of products and households useful for design purposes, up to understand how to fill the gap perceived by the user between needs and solutions. It considered the potential benefits of using IoT indicators to collect missing information about both the product, its use and its operating environment to address critical aspects in the design stage, thus extending products’ lifetime. This thesis highlighted the importance of building multidisciplinary design teams to investigate different classes of requirements, and the need for flexible tools to cope with complex and evolving requirements, the co-evolution of problem and solutions and investigating open-ended questions. This approach leaves room for addressing every step of the traditional life-cycle in a more circular way, shifting the focus from the life-cycle centrality of the previous century to a more complex vision about the product

Contamination Lab of Turin (CLabTo): how to teach entrepreneurship education to all kinds of university students

Interest in offering Entrepreneurship Education (EE) to all kinds of university students is increasing. Therefore, universities are increasing the number of entrepreneurship courses intended for students from different fields of study and with different education levels. Through a single case study of the Contamination Lab of Turin (CLabTo), we suggest how EE may be taught to all kinds of university students. We have combined design methods with EE to create a practical-oriented entrepreneurship course which allows students to work in transdisciplinary teams through a learning-by-doing approach on real-life projects. Professors from different departments have been included to create a multidisciplinary environment. We have drawn on programme assessment data, including pre- and postsurveys. Overall, we have found a positive effect of the programme on the students’ entrepreneurial skills. However, when the data was broken down according to the students’ fields of study and education levels, mixed results emerged

The Flavours of Coffee Grounds: the coffee waste as accelerator of new local businesses

Annual generation of Spent Coffee Grounds (SCG) is estimated around six million tonnes per year. They currently do not have a commercial value and are disposed of in landfills or as compost. Systemic Design approach developed by Politecnico di Torino (Department of Architecture and Design) wants to provide a holistic vision in which these productions are linked together through relationships, output and input, flows of energy and materials, in order to make the SCG recovery activity complex, with almost no waste. This research studies how to make real and profitable a system that values this waste considering the local condition

On the meaningfulness of data in product design for lifetime optimization

Planned obsolescence is generally considered as a negative business strategy that induces replacement needs and affects attachment dynamics, as opposed to the goal of elongating product lifetime. At the present, however, an early replacement of long-lasting products is preferred in at least two cases which can be addressed during the design stage i.e. when the cost of maintaining is higher than product benefits and when there are environmental reasons to replace obsolete products. Furthermore, designing meaningful products that help the user in his/her daily activities, while addressing environmental issues, could help affecting attachment even in standardized and utilitarian products, such as home appliances. In this study, the holistic view and the management of the complexity of Systemic Design, combined with the use of the IoT technologies are proposed using the refrigerator as a case study. Acquiring information is considered as a tool for product innovation; the data is divided into (i) static data, related to the product and (ii) dynamic data, which derive from the context of use and interaction with users. The latter can be acquired by investigating the object's daily use and environment, with data acquisition through quantitative tools (sensors) and qualitative ones (feedback, questionnaires, interviews). IoT and data retrieval open a variety of possibilities in monitoring, accessing more precise knowledge of products and households useful for design purposes. This paper seeks to demonstrate how IoT can support and trigger a design transition towards more durable products and components, by focusing on sustainability and simplifying people's lives in daily actions

Assessment tools for disposable and long durability products

The current market situation is characterized by planned obsolescence. It warns the need to design in a more efficiently way, by optimizing the recycle and disassembly operations and lowering the impact on the environment of all kind of products, from the easiest to the most complex ones. This paper focuses on short-lived and long durability products by analyzing them respectively according to the methodologies developed by the Observatory of EcoPack (OEP) and the Design by Components (DC) that share the same general framework and scenario. For disposable products, i.e. packaging, the analysis was carried out with a comparative analysis on components and communication, up to the definition of guidelines for a specific productive sector. Regarding the long durability goods, i.e. household appliances, the analysis is done according to the DC, in which the complex products are simplify to a function-essential structure. This is the starting point for a new design of complex goods focused on disassembly and maintenance. These two methodologies are able to provide useful tools for designing and innovating, through a scientific quali-quantitative analysis on products that are currently on the market

APPROCCIO SISTEMICO E GESTIONE MULTISCALA DEI DATI. 'Il caso studio ‘frigorifero'. / A SYSTEM APPROACH AND MULTISCALE DATA MANAGEMENT. A ‘refrigerator’ case study.

Numerose tecnologie digitali come l’Intenet of Things, l’Intelligenza Artificiale e il Ma-chine Learning potrebbero stravolgere il modo di concepire il processo progettuale, soprattutto quando impiegate per reperire informazioni indispensabili alla definizione del problema, individuare i requisiti e sostenere decisioni progettuali, tipiche della fase di pre-design. In questo saggio si riflette sulla complessità del progetto, sulla necessità di un approccio sistemico basato su metodi partecipativi e sull’utilizzo di prototipi co-me strumenti per sbloccare il potenziale, ancora ampiamente inesplorato, dell’utilizzo dei dati ai fini progettuali. In seguito a un esperimento condotto su un frigorifero, sono state inoltre tratte conclusioni su visioni future, aspetti metodologici di progettazione nell’ambito del design sistemico e sulla relazione tra dato e sostenibilità. Many digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Ma-chine Learning, could radically change the way of conceiving a design process, espe-cially when they are used to retrieve essential information to define a problem, identify the requirements and support design decisions, all of which are typical of the pre-de-sign phase. In this essay, we reflect on the complexity of designing, on the need for a systemic approach based on participatory methods and on the use of prototypes as tools to unlock the potential, albeit still largely untapped, use of data for design pur-poses. An experiment has been conducted on a refrigerator and conclusions have been drawn on future visions, methodological aspects in the field of systemic design and the relationship between data and sustainability

Design for Next Connected Appliances

After a deep recession in 2009, home appliance manufacturing has evolved quickly, increasing sales and forecasting of a huge spread of Internet of Things connected products. Despite the potential of the IoT as a future scenario for the development of major home appliances, data collected on actual purchases seem to contradict the trend. Manufacturers justify this gap with the consumers' resistance to adopt new technologies and to change their habits. Nevertheless the consumer claims a lack of perceived benefits in connected appliances, showing strong concern about data transfer to third parties. Investigate user needs and focus on the environmental sustainability of products could solve this techno-stress, allowing the user to perceive the benefits. This paper aims to guide companies and designers, through the application of the Systemic Design approach, to change their goals, allowing them to achieve product innovation together with an environmentally conscious product design

Designing with the use of data for a better understanding of people and operating contexts in sociotechnical systems

The complex systems defined as ‘sociotechnical systems’ are made of software, hardware and people, somehow linked to the policy and a large number of stakeholders. They show complex dependencies and functional-based constraints. Over the last decades, the need to cope with the complexity took different forms, evolving in research activities and new disciplines. Systemic Design (SD) is an approach to manage the complexity that draws its origins into the General System Theories, cybernetics and generative science of the twentieth century, up to the recent attention towards systems thinking. Cyber-physical systems (CPSs), on the other hand, draws its origins from software and mechanical engineering, merging theory of cybernetics, mechatronics, design and process science. In CPS computing and communication are tightly coupled with the monitoring and control of entities in the physical world (Cheng and Atlee, 2008). The idea behind CPS is similar to the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT), with which it shares the same architecture. IoT is growing importance also in the design field. As design research by definition is intended to produce knowledge, this knowledge can be acquired by merging different methods, e.g. qualitative and quantitative. The data collected and made available from IoT technologies quantifies aspects that were not measurable before, providing content for other research activities such as ethnographic research and participatory activities. The designer could query some physical object and obtain useful data for the design. In this paper, we seek to address the design process in the era of the IoT, exploring the use of data in the early design stages as a means to investigate the application domain and stakeholders’ interaction with products

L’Accademia ai designer va stretta. La scientificità dei creativi.

Modalità di comunicazione nel mondo accademico del design attraverso paper, workshop e laborator