The design It is a rapidly developing discipline, which deals with “project objects” always different, not only the traditional ones such as products, graphics, interiors, but also other areas, as in this specific case, the services. The service design It is the most appropriate theoretical and practical context for the initiative “Journey in Italy”. This approach focuses on the user of the tourist experience, trying to understand not only the material needs but also the less explicit requests: the emotions, the need to learn, the request for authenticity, the relationship with the local environment, with the people, with the history and tradition of that context.
The Italian design has gained a significant reputation in the world, linked to aspects that we could call specific to everyone's life. It is a design of the lifeware, a term that indicates everything that is in everyday life: food, mobility, home, clothes, and also includes all those moments that make everyone's existence pregnant, such as that moment of happiness associated with the discovery of a place, the taste of a specific food, the pleasure of conversation and comparison with those who live in that place.
Service design starts from person, which is not simply a bearer of interests but is itself a bearer of capabilities. The tourist experience project cannot ignore this dimension, considering people not as passive actors but as active protagonists in the sustainable use of places that are often delicate, fragile, yet worthy of an enhancement capable of making them accessible and, at the same time, protected.
We deal with design and design training. Design is a discipline that deals with innovation and well-being, a practice of human action that transforms raw technologies to improve the quality of people's lives. Design has different project objects, including lifeware, all those products that somehow dress the daily life of each person, including food. Design deals with food, from the act of eating of someone sipping a good glass of wine or eating a delicious plate of spaghetti, to the experience of the place of consumption, from a beautifully laid table to the warm atmosphere of a well-designed restaurant.
And then there are the ways to display food: we are often urged to "invent" new forms of the same or to present it with effective and, often, speaking packaging to describe the qualities of that product, the nutritional aspects, the contributions - if any - made to the well-being of the person. And aspects that today are becoming increasingly significant such as the prevalent dimension of the “sustainability” of food.
Design today is concerned with services by designing interfaces that help people understand how to avoid reckless behavior. App as Too Good to Go they urge us to "save food", recovering expired food and distributing it to private citizens and the needy, thanks to the power of networks and increasingly efficient logistics. Or Babaco Market which saves the ugly but good, seasonal vegetables and fruit that have strange shapes, are not polished to perfection or have small dents.
And then there is the technology. Recently a well-known pasta company has experimented with design and food technology experts, effective solutions for logistics. A flat package, well filled, where there is no air because there are no 3D and hollow shapes, works better.
The theme of the service and its project is particularly intriguing if one considers the size social food consumption. Eating together is, perhaps, what makes us most human. In this aspect, design plays an important role because it creates environments and rituals that foster relationships, often they are objects that trigger conversations and relationships, like the rotating circles of Chinese tables. All this is design which has at its centre the "relation", sometimes mediated by objects, sometimes by environments which, by innovating, contributes to improving people's well-being.
Prof. Francesco Zurlo
Dean of the School of Design at the Milan Polytechnic
