PhD in industrial design (2016)
E-mail: lorenzo.davoli@gmail.com
Background
My name is Lorenzo and I am a designer and a researcher with a
focus on service and interaction design. I obtained my PhD at the
Umeå Institute of
Design and my MSc in Industrial Design at Politecnico di
Milano. Between these studies I had the opportunity to work at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research assistant
for the Vehicle Design Summit, collaborating with the
Senseable City Lab and interning with the Mobility and Energy
Efficiency Team at the Rocky Mountain
Institute in Boulder Colorado. Through these experiences I
developed competences and skills about how to guide companies and
public institutions in their transition toward configurations more
attentive and responsive to the needs of contemporary society and
its service and information economies.
Presence and Participation
There is an emerging set of needs in our post-industrial
society that require a contextual sensitivity and local
flexibility that traditional industrial infrastructures
seem to lack. The purpose of this research is to look at the
role that design can play in addressing the transformation
process of industrial infrastructures towards more distributed
models that are sensitive to local needs and receptive
to bottom up innovation. The aim of this work is to explore
what a design practice addressing these issues might be like.
Design fictions and critical interventions are crafted and
used as tools for participation and means to reanimate the often
invisible figure and functioning of the networks around us; to
prototype new ones and engage publics in a discussion
about their qualities and possible
future (technological) developments.
Research blog: www.smoothings.com/transtructures/
Antenna
Allowing citizens and cities to gain control over the metadata
they daily produce could be the first important step to
enable the design of new contextualized services in support local
economies and the redefinition of the private-public relationship.
The Antenna is a fictionaldevice made for hacking into mobile
networks. It was prototyped as a way to articulate issues and
possibilities for design interventions and initiate bottom-up
innovation within these sensitive, private and otherwise
inaccessible infrastructures.
The
Drone Postobox
The drone postbox is the basic unit of a concept for
a distributed and community owned delivery network for
goods distribution in the Swedish countryside. To develop this
concept participatory hacking sessions to explore and
reveal the systemic functioning of existing delivery services on
the territory took place with participants using a set of sensor
and cultural probes named "the trojan boxes". Maps and
videos of how different networks operate have been created through
cameras and GPS, making accessible as design material systems
usually intentionally not accessible for design
interventions.
Mapping and visualizing infrastructures and their
functionalities allowed to better understand their existing
configurations and how to possibly create synergies and
designs in response to their behaviors and according to local
needs. This little red hut does not represent a solution or final
concept, but just a materialization of a possibility, a kind of
rhetorical artifacts, developed to support the staging of
participatory design processes and rehearse this concept
with local communities and stakeholders.
Areas of interest
Infrastructures; Co-Design; Service Design; Critical
Practice;
Previous projects:
SATIN
Project
RMI Fleets
Trash
Track
Publications
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