My boy builds coffins. Future memories of your loved ones

The research is focus on the concept of storytelling associated with product design, trying to investigate new ways of designing and a possible future scenario related to the concept of death. MY BOY BUILDS COFFINS is a gravestone made using a combination of cremation’s ashes and resin. It is composed by a series of holes in which the user can stitch a text, in order to remember the loved one. The stitching need of a particular yarn produced in Switzerland using some parts of human body. Project also provides another version which uses LED lights instead of the yarn. The LEDs - thanks to an inductive coupling - will light when It will be posed in the hole. The gravestone can be placed where you want, as if it would create a little altar staff at home. In this way, there is a real connection between the user and the dearly departed

Open Design: Collaborative Organization and Digital Democratization

Contemporary post-industrial development has changed the organizational make up of labour in every sector, with a shift towards flexible and collaborative networks of knowledge work, to address issues such as decentralization, coordination and participation. This paper relates to recent developments in the fields of design, technology, and the social sciences in the ‘networks’ that inform knowledge development and creativity in design. Since the rise of internet, and a knowledge-based society, the concept of “network” stands for a different scheme of organization -- from hierarchical structures towards more horizontal geometries, which can develop and spread forms of collaborative creativity. While the image of the designer/artist is often someone who works alone in his office, creating unique masterpieces, design in fact happens to be highly affected by the dynamics of networking. New technologies and their accessibility are shaping a society where ‘everybody’ cam design, enabling new critical experiences of participation and also activism. This contribution to the design literature will focus on the scenarios concerning the new roles of designer, facing society, and its organisational structure through networks, while experimenting on self-production. Here, design can play a new role as an intelligent actor in complex networks, not just giving solutions with a top-down approach, moreover, spreading and developing tools for collaboration

Design for Next Design

AbstractDesign has always played a role in envisioning the next shape of the world. The nature of the process of transformation performs an important role in defining the shape through a complex network of interactions: any material and immaterial configuration is always an ongoing plastic phenomenon resulting from the combination of complex factors, details, properties, techniques, materials and of course people.After the paradigms of industry and mass production, design is growing as a multifaceted activity, which is multiplying its products, tasks, and actors in order to face the challenges of next society and often exceeding the disciplinary boundaries of knowledge. Out of any utopian view of the future, design is getting back to look ahead of time in order to shape our material and immaterial world here and now. The shift brought by technology is declaring the emergence of the process in design in every form, where the designer assumes the role of facilitator for enabling the conversation between dif..

Design: An Un-Disciplined Discipline Out of the Borders

Design, as an approach to action, is always placing itself within the track of innovation, between material and immaterial matters, product and service. Nevertheless, Design was never built from a clear and defined field, as a starting point. Rather its framing as a discipline has been historicized and “hardened” over years, in parallel with several disciplines. Through this ongoing evolution we can see a clearly and recognizably a “disciplined” theoretical apparatus

A public early intervention approach to first-episode psychosis: treated incidence over 7 years in the Emilia-Romagna region.

Aim: To estimate the treated incidence of individuals with first-episode psychosis (FEP) who contacted the Emilia-Romagna public mental healthcare system (Italy); to examine the variability of incidence and user characteristics across centres and years. Methods: We computed the raw treated incidence in 2013–2019, based on FEP users aged 18–35, seen within or outside the regional program for FEP. We modelled FEP incidence across 10 catchment areas and 7 years using Bayesian Poisson and Negative Binomial Generalized Linear Models of varying complexity. We explored associations between user characteristics, study centre and year comparing variables and socioclinical clusters of subjects. Results: Thousand three hundred and eighteen individuals were treated for FEP (raw incidence: 25.3 / 100.000 inhabitant year, IQR: 15.3). A Negative Binomial location-scale model with area, population density and year as predictors found that incidence and its variability changed across centres (Bologna: 36.55; 95% CrI: 30.39–43.86; Imola: 3.07; 95% CrI: 1.61–4.99) but did not follow linear temporal trends or density. Centers were associated with different user age, gender, migrant status, occupation, living conditions and cluster distribution. Year was associated negatively with HoNOS score (R = 0.09, p < .001), duration of untreated psychosis (R = 0.12, p < .001) and referral type. Conclusions: The Emilia-Romagna region presents a relatively high but variable incidence of FEP across areas, but not in time. More granular information on social, ethnic and cultural factors may increase the level of explanation and prediction of FEP incidence and characteristics, shedding light on social and healthcare factors influencing FEP

HABITAT: An IoT Solution for Independent Elderly

In this work, a flexible and extensive digital platform for Smart Homes is presented, exploiting the most advanced technologies of the Internet of Things, such as Radio Frequency Identification, wearable electronics, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the main novelty of the paper is the system-level description of the platform flexibility allowing the interoperability of different smart devices. This research was developed within the framework of the operative project HABITAT (Home Assistance Based on the Internet of Things for the Autonomy of Everybody), aiming at developing smart devices to support elderly people both in their own houses and in retirement homes, and embedding them in everyday life objects, thus reducing the expenses for healthcare due to the lower need for personal assistance, and providing a better life quality to the elderly users