Design for Emergency at the 2021 Italian Design Day
In partnership with the Italian Consulate in Boston
Written by Estefanía C. Ch
Center for Design, Northeastern University
What do we do as designers in the face of the pandemic?
In other words, what should our role as designers be in order to re-act to the pandemic? These questions sparked reflection among Paolo Ciuccarelli and Sara Colombo, founders of the Design for Emergency (DfE) initiative.
Design the conditions for designing in the case of emergency.
The Design for Emergency (DfE) initiative interprets the theme of the Italian Design Day 2021 edition, “Design and Matter” by moving the focus from the product to the process of design: Design for Emergency is a catalyst of creativity, a platform established to enable designers of all levels and provenances to tackle the challenges of the current pandemic and other future emergencies. Ideas are the matter here, and design is applied to create the conditions for designers to make an impact on a societal scale. During the event, speakers shared their experiences with the initiative, its origin, current state, and future plans.
The DfE initiative moved from Italy, among the most affected countries at the beginning of the pandemic, before reaching 12 other countries. The first seed idea which developed into a fully functional product called “Angelo” is from Italy and was be presented during the event.
Italian Design Day (IDD) is the annual theme-based review launched in 2017 by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in collaboration and with the support of the Ministry for Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism. IDD offers an extensive program of promotional events created by the network of Embassies, Consulates, Italian Cultural Institutes, and ICE Offices abroad and has established itself over the years as an effective instrument in supporting the promotion of design and the internationalization of a strategic industrial sector for Italian exports. Every year, to mark the occasion, 100 different testimonials become the narrators of Italian design and creativity throughout the rest of the world. In 2021, the Center for Design was one of those testimonials.
The initiative exposes how systemic design and multidisciplinary collaboration can come together to tackle bigger issues.
At the Center for Design, we believe that design can act as a social enabler and facilitator, bringing people together to act together and address systemic challenges. Design for Emergency was born at the Center for Design (CfD) to help designers come up with solutions faster, providing data and insights about people’s needs and experiences with the pandemic. Targeting designers as the main audience, DfE applies a meta-design approach to make an impact on a societal scale. Envisioning design as a process that provides tools and spaces in which others can design is key for the initiative as it creates an enabling platform that can catalyze and activate more design forces, leveraging systemic design as an overarching approach to respond to the pandemic and other future challenges.
The Design for Emergency initiative served as a platform for incubating and catalyzing design ideas that came up in response to the pandemic. Everything that lives in the platform is ready to be used and activated freely — Design for Emergency works as an open platform where all ideas and projects are an invitation to collectively build on top of and further develop initial inspirations. The platform provides multiple levels of outcomes that can be developed by different stakeholders for different purposes and challenges.
In a nutshell, this is how it works: a survey was circulated in 12 different countries as soon as the pandemic started. It gathered the feelings and experiences of people around the world. The platform also provides results of the survey and open data accessible to everyone. The data analysis exposes insights that designers can choose to focus on to come up with solutions. Then, ideating solutions and sharing open seed ideas creates a community of stakeholders motivated to target different challenges. The initiative also has open design challenges that ask participants to look at data and come up with solutions. The Seed Ideas in the platform are categorized into 4 main topics: Physical Safety, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Shared Experience, and Community Support. Ideas and projects are posted accordingly and are free to use.
So, developing seed ideas to generate impact with concrete solutions is the goal. A few ideas have been implemented:
Higienizador Modular / Modular Sanitizer for children in Brazil from communities in need, and Angelo — a hearing device that helped the elderly in social isolation in nursing homes in Italy connect with their loved ones. (see video). Angelo was created by Luciano Fumagalli and then, inspired Chiara Mauri and Andrea Randazzo from Storie Design Studio to take it further. They understood the human value behind Angelo and wanted to make their contribution to enhance Luciano’s idea — for the elderly and their families. For Chiara and Andrea, understanding users and their needs, gestures, and the intended outcomes were key to further developing Angelo as a simple, easy-to-use, and intuitive product. Furthermore, Valentina from a school wanted to further develop Angelo together with her students, who empathize with Luciano’s motivation and elderlies in need, and they had design workshops that led them to design Angelo V.3 to aid more nursing homes. This is just one example of how the initiative hopes to keep bringing stakeholders together, leveraging ideas, and using them for good.
The impact of this pandemic has also exposed a social emergency and systemic challenges that need to be addressed. Therefore, the Design for Emergency team envisions changing the name of the platform to, perhaps — Design IN THE emergency — because we are constantly seeing the emergence of issues and the future may expose even more. Having this kind of platform will enable different actors to be ready to act and re-act in case of emergencies, instead of having to think of ways to react because the platform will already provide them with ideas to be used as input and tools to find solutions faster. Climate Change, among others, for example, may be the next challenge to tackle through this initiative.
