italian DESIGN DAY 2022

CHICAGO EDITION

MARCH 23, 2022 - 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM CST

ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY - HERMANN HALL

Italian Design Day (IDD) is an annual theme-based celebration which was launched in 2017 by Italy’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in collaboration and with the support of its Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

IDD offers an extensive program of promotional events created by the network of Embassies, Consulates, Italian Cultural Institutes and Italian Trade Agency (ITA) 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.

The theme of the 2022 Italian Design Day is “Re-Generation. Design and New Technologies for a Sustainable Future.” and it’s closely linked to the ‘Made in Italy’ system with the purpose of projecting the Italian design expertise and the manufacturing system stemming from it across the world.

This year, the ITA Chicago office in collaboration with the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design will host a complimentary event on March 23, 2022 at the Hermann Hall Conference Center followed with a light reception and networking opportunities.

Meet Carlos Teixeira

Carlos Teixeira is the Charles L. Owen Professor in Design at IIT Institute of Design (ID), where he teaches graduate courses and advises doctoral students on the strategic use of design capabilities in complex spaces of innovation. He is also faculty director of the Action Lab.

Carlos’s research interests include the areas of design strategy, open innovation, and sustainable solutions. The central question of his current research is, “How can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environment, finance, and social networks?”

He received the Game Changer award by Metropolis magazine in 2013 for his work on the DREAM:IN Project, developing open innovation platforms for designing sustainable solutions in India, Brazil, and China.

In 2021 he received two honors from Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards and one from CORE 77 Design Awards for his projects with graduate design students at the Institute of Design on ‘Tactical Design for Pandemics’ and ‘Envisioning Food Sourcing Solutions.’

He advises global leaders in organizations on how to build the know-how to innovate through design capabilities and strategies. Carlos received a doctorate in design from ID in 2002. Previous to his PhD, he received a master’s and bachelor’s degree in design from Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Before joining ID in 2016, Carlos served as a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York (2003–15), where he was instrumental in developing undergraduate and graduate programs in strategic design and transdisciplinary design. In 2014 he received the Distinguished Teaching Award by The New School for his innovative pedagogy in graduate design studios and projects.

Meet Stefano Maffei

Architect and Ph.D. in Design. Full Time Professor at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, he teaches Advanced Product-Service System and Production Models and Service Design and he’s member of the Executive Board (Delegate to the Third Mission) of the Department of Design and member of Board of the Design Phd School within the same institution where he recently coordinated the Design Ph.D. Summer School . He’s the Director of Polifactory the Fab Lab/Maker Space of Politecnico di Milano, which integrates a coworking (for talents pre-incubation), a product-service-system research lab that explores innovation models connected to micro and distributed production. He’s also the Director of the Service Design Master and of next to start Design for Food Master and furthermore the Service Innovation Academy, POLI.design, Politecnico di Milano.

He coordinated the EU-funded project DeEP (Design in European Policies) and the Politecnico Unit within the EU-funded project Design for Europe/EDIP (European Design Innovation Platform).These experiences originated the Design Policy Lab of which he is the Coordinator that explores the design for policy thematic area: in this area he coordinated the Polimi’s participation to the the EU Policy Lab Project The Future of Government 2030+. A Citizen Centric Perspective on New Government Models . He recently finished the H2020 Sme Instrument Project Bitride. Now he’s coordinating the Polimi’s Units in the Creative Europe Project DDMP (Distributed Design Market Platform; the H2020 Project SISCODE, the H2020 Project REFLOW and the recently won H2020 T-FACTOR.

He coordinated also the recent (ended November 2021) EIT FOOD funded project THE COLLABORATIVE KITCHEN within the framework of the NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS - Cross-KIC Call Citizen Engagement. The action was developed by the Design Policy Lab, Politecnico di Milano together with Caritas Reggio Emilia, to increase the circularity of the food donation systems through co-design. He also co-develops pilot projects with public bodies and institutions exploring the creation of innovation ecosystems based on openP2P collaboration between designers, makers and makerspaces, and SMEs/Craftsmen.

He works with Sanofi Genzyme since 2017 as Scientific Coordinator and Executive Leader of the project MakeToCare, a research that aims to map and represent an emerging ecosystem made up of innovative patients, independent researchers, research institutions, startups and new entrepreneurs, makers and laboratories for digital manufacturing that work to develop concrete design solutions, capable of improving the daily life and health of people living in situations of disability. The core knowledge of this research path has been condensed in the platform Design Healthcare Innovation that now is the base for a comparative study of Milan/Boston Healthcare Ecosystems together with the Center for Design, CAMD, Northeastern University, Boston.

His current research and work interests focus on new production-distribution models and advanced-distributed-micro manufacturing systems and service design-driven innovation. He received the ADI’s (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale) XXII° Compasso D’Oro Prize for Design Research with Design Research Maps (2011).

A complete bibliography (composed by scientific + cultural texts, articles, books, essays) could be found @ the ORCID page: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9820-1326

Design Day 2022 Gallery

For more information, please contact the ITA office in Chicago by e-mail chicago@ice.it or by phone +1 (312) 670-4360