Ezio Manzini is an Italian design academic and author known for his work on design for social innovation and sustainability. He is Honorary Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Chair Professor at University of the Arts London, and presently Distinguished Professor on Design for Social Innovation at ELISAVA, and guest professor at Tongji University and Jiangnan University. [1] Manzini is the founder of DESIS, an international network on design for social innovation and sustainability. [2]
Ezio Manzini studied at the Politecnico di Milano where he later joined the faculty. During his time at the school, Manzini worked on several international research projects including co-ordinating the Unit of Research DIS (Design and Innovation for Sustainability), the Doctorate in Design, and DES (Design dei Servizi) in the Centre for Service Design. [3]
Manzini is an author on sustainable design. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his research focussed on the design of materials and strategic design. He wrote on topics such as scenario building toward solutions that encompass environmental and social quality; innovative processes in the system of production and consumption; and the relationship between product strategies and environmental policies from the perspective of sustainable development. [4] Though he is perhaps most well known for his work on design for social innovation. In the 2015 book, Design, When Everybody Designs, Manzini provides an overview of the way design has been deployed in the social innovation space to guide transition to more sustainable practices. The book explores the role of diffuse and expert design, it describes the concept of cosmopolitan localism, and Manzini's Small, Open, Local, and Connected (SLOC) scenario. [5]
In 2009 Manzini founded DESIS, an international network of design schools and related organisations working on initiatives and projects in the design for social innovation and sustainability fields. [6]
In addition to his time at Politecnico, Manzini was the Director of Design and Vice-president of the Domus Academy in the 1990s, and Chair Professor of Design under the Distinguished Scholars Scheme at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2000.
He has received honorary titles at several universities including Honorary Doctoral of Arts at Aalto University, [7] Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at The New School and Goldsmiths, University of London; Honorary Professor at the Glasgow School of Art; and Fellow at the Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Melbourne. [3]
The Polytechnic University of Turin is the oldest Italian public technical university. The university offers several courses in the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Urban Planning and Industrial Design, and is consistently ranked as one of the best universities in Italy and in Europe. As of 2023, it is ranked( QS World University Rankings ) 26th worldwide for Mechanical Engineering, 15th for Petroleum Engineering, 28th for Architecture and is among the top 50 (#45th) engineering universities in the world.
The Polytechnic University of Milan is the largest technical university in Italy, with about 42,000 students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and higher education courses in engineering, architecture and design. Founded in 1863, it is the oldest university in Milan.
Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.
Yrjö Kalervo Sotamaa is a Finnish designer and design strategist. Sotamaa is Professor Emeritus of Design Innovation in the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture and President Emeritus of the University of Art and Design Helsinki (TAIK). He served as the president of TAIK from 1986 until 2008. He earned his MA in Interior Architecture and Furniture Design from TAIK, where he studied with Kaj Franck and Antti Nurmesniemi.
Antonio Citterio is an Italian architect, furniture designer and industrial designer who lives and works in Milan.
Marco Zanuso was an Italian Modernist architect and designer.
Carlo Ratti is an Italian architect, engineer, educator and author. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group that explores how new technologies are changing the way we understand, design and ultimately live in cities. Ratti is also a founding partner of the international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, which has offices in Turin, New York and London. He is also a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and an Honorary Professor at TTPU Tashkent. Ratti was named one of the "50 most influential designers in America" by Fast Company and highlighted in Wired magazine's "Smart List: 50 people who will change the world".
Metadesign is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social, economic and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It consists of a series of practical design-related tools for achieving this.
Product-service systems (PSS) are business models that provide for cohesive delivery of products and services. PSS models are emerging as a means to enable collaborative consumption of both products and services, with the aim of pro-environmental outcomes.
Alberto Meda is an Italian engineer and designer. His work is held in museums around the world. He works and lives in Milan.
Jørgen Randers is a Norwegian academic, professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and practitioner in the field of future studies. His professional field encompasses model-based futures studies, scenario analysis, system dynamics, sustainability, climate, energy and ecological economics. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome, a company director, member of various not-for-profit boards, business consultant on global sustainability matters and author. His publications include the seminal work The Limits to Growth (co-author), and Reinventing Prosperity.
In 2000 Paolo Brescia and Tommaso Principi established the collective OBR to investigate new ways of contemporary living, creating a design network among Milan, London and New York. After working with Renzo Piano, Paolo and Tommaso have oriented the research of OBR towards the integration artifice-nature, to create sensitive architecture in perpetual change, stimulating the interaction between man and environment. The team of OBR develops its design activity through public-private social programs, promoting – through architecture – the sense of community and the individual identities. Today OBR is group open to different multidisciplinary contributors, cooperating with different universities, such as Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Aalto University, Academy of Architecture of Mumbai and Mimar Sinan Fine Art University. Among the best known works by OBR are the Pythagoras Museum, the New Galleria Sabauda in Turin, the Milanofiori Residential Complex, the Children Hospital in Parma, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa, the Lido of Genoa, the Ex Cinema Roma, the Triennale di Milano Terrace. The under construction projects by OBR include the Lehariya Cluster in Jaipur, the Jafza Traders Market in Dubai and the Multiuse Complex Ahmad Qasir in Teheran. OBR's projects have been featured in Venice Biennale of Architecture, Royal Institute of British Architects in London, Bienal de Arquitetura of Brasilia, MAXXI in Rome and Triennale di Milano. OBR has been awarded with the AR Award for Emerging Architecture at RIBA, the Plusform under 40, the Urbanpromo at the 11° Biennale di Venezia, the honourable mention for the Medaglia d'Oro all'Architettura Italiana, the Europe 40 Under 40 in Madrid, the Leaf Award overall winner in London, the WAN Residential Award, the Building Healthcare Award, the Inarch Award for Italian Architecture and the American Architecture Prize in New York. Since 2004 OBR has been evolving its design parameters according to the environmental and energy certification LEED and since 2009 OBR is partner of the GBC.
Stefano Marzano is an Italian architect and designer. He served as Chief Design Officer and CEO of Philips Design at Royal Philips International between 1991 and 2011. He served as Chief Design Officer and as member of the Group Management at Electrolux from January 2012 until he retired at the end of 2013.
Integrated modification methodology (IMM) is a procedure encompassing an open set of scientific techniques for morphologically analyzing the built environment in a multiscale manner and evaluating its performance in actual states or under specific design scenarios.
Aldo Cibic is an Italian designer.
The College of Medallists is an association of recipients of The Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services in Design Education. Misha Black (1910–1977) was a pioneer of design in Britain. The College of Medallists was established in 2000, and joined the Founding Bodies in supporting the Sir Misha Black Awards. In 2020, the College of Medallists became part of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, with the Imperial College of London as a founding body.
Setsu and Shinobu Ito are Japanese designers. Their work is stored as permanent collections in the Modern Art Museums in Munich, Germany and Milan, Italy.
Systemic design is an interdiscipline that integrates systems thinking and design practices. It is a pluralistic field, with several dialects including systems-oriented design. Influences have included critical systems thinking and second-order cybernetics. In 2021, the Design Council (UK) began advocating for a systemic design approach and embedded it in a revision of their double diamond model.
Diffuse design refers to the designing capability of individuals who are not formally trained as designers. Drawing on the natural human ability to adopt a design approach, nonexpert designers bring diffuse design into the world via a combination of critical sense, creativity, and practical sense.
Cosmopolitan localism or Cosmolocalism is a social innovation approach to community development that seeks to link local and global communities through resilient infrastructures that bring production and consumption closer together, building on distributed systems. The concept of cosmopolitan localism was pioneered by Wolfgang Sachs, a scholar in the field of environment, development, and globalization. Sachs is known as one of the many followers of Ivan Illich and his work has influenced the green and ecological movements. Contrary to glocalisation, cosmolocalism moves from locality to universality, acknowledging the local as the locus of social co-existence and emphasizing the potential of global networking beyond capitalist market rules.
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