Moving in the City

• Interaction Design

Project Role

• Concept Development
• Design Research
• Graphic Design
• Prototyping

Brief
The Salone del Mobile, an internationally-recognized design week in Milan, is held annually in April. As one of our projects in a fourth year Interaction Design course, we were asked to consider ways of enhancing a visitor’s travel throughout the location zones of the Salone.

Process
Our problem statement indicated that designers and visitors who visit intend on travelling around zones in the city in an efficient way and attend to information that gives them hints about what they might be able to do. Objects have a valuable role in helping a person explore the city in a fluid, directed, and intuitive manner. At the same time, our group acknowledged the amount of refuse and trash that results in these type of events, and looked for multi-purposeful uses for our ideas.

Delivery
Following a Service Strategy approach, the idea of “Mapkins” and “Digital Direction” were presented as an analog and digital alternatives to navigating around the Salone.

The former, involving no technology, has square zone grids of the Salone map printed on napkins that are stacked together as part of food setup in each exhibition. Each square has a particular zone sectioned with its exhibitions listed in the back. The concept derived from MVRDV’s concept of stacking and layering. The Mapkins create a dimensional puzzle, visually representing popular zones by the amount taken compared to others, and encouraging spatial exploration of the Salone.

The later presents a device and rental service which implements tags that interact with each other and an interactive display windows that indicates the distance of a visitor’s chosen destinations.

Collaborators