Warm Up! An Experimental Project on Design for Social Innovation and Urban Regeneration

The research aims to share the results from the “Warm Up” Workshop—an experimental project held by PhD Product Design students from Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with St. Petersburg University (SPbU)—involving students from SPbU’s Graphic Design Master Degree Program. The objective is to apply the topics of Design for Social Innovation and Design for Public Space to investigate the opportunities for new sociability in the social context of Vasilyevsky Island in St. Petersburg. The experimental aspect of the workshop is due to the fusion of methods and approaches typical of Product Design, such as human-centered design (HCD), and the Avant-Garde heritage of the Russian School. By illustrating their concepts of products/services, the students have developed a new practice within the fields of Product Design and User Experience. The final result is to serve a hypothetical urban regeneration in terms of Social Innovation, designing the user experiences as storyboards with the classical structure of “before and after” that would narrate the final change in users’ behaviors.