Today started the two-week workshop led by Francesca Foglieni and Beatrice Villari from the Master Board, in partnership with Lendlease, one of the stakeholders of the MIND project. MIND – Milano Innovation District – aims to capitalize on the success of Expo 2015 and place Milan on the map of the world’s gateway cities, leveraging on the local excellences in life sciences. The project’s goal is to enhance the quality of people’s lives and promote the country’s sustainable economic development and international growth, through an infrastructural platform that will enable scientific, economic, and social innovation.

The strategic partnership between Lendlease and the Specializing Master in Service Design is focused on the investigation and the organization of the MIND-area’s service system. Different stakeholders and user categories, with their different needs and privileges, will co-create and use the same system. The student’s brief focus on the exploration, the organization, and the visualization of the Service Map. Those services will be connected with the communication system and will be integrated with the physical space.

The challenge posed by Lendlease to students aims to answer the following questions:
• What could Lendlease offer to companies and workers who operate in the Village?
• How could Village users get aware of and access those services?

Students will be required to face the topic mixing desk research and field research, and to reflect on 4 different sub-topics for what concerns the generations of service solutions:
1. Service platform: The Mind Village will host a huge ecosystem of different companies, but linked by some transversal needs that can be addressed through dedicated services. For example, supporting wayfinding and access to spaces, customer relations, usage behaviour analysis, communication, and so on...
2. Knowledge sharing: In an open innovation perspective, with the aim of making the Mind Village an acknowledged innovation ecosystem at international level, it will be essential to provide services that enable the exchange and cross-pollination between companies, people knowledge, data and resources...
3. Welfare & wellbeing: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the companies’ awareness towards the importance of providing welfare plans that not only increase the purchasing power of their employees, but that also accompany them in their professional growth, support them from a psycho-social point of view and to adapt to the changing labour market...
4. Personal services: As a district of innovation on the heels of the "15-min city" model, Mind aspires to be a small city (or a portion of city) in which workers (and, later on, residents) will find everything they need to spend their free time thanks to services for culture, sport, entertainment...

Ideas developed by students will then be prototyped and an exhibition will be set up in class to present them to the client. Thanks to this intensive workshop, our students will learn how to set up and conduct a mixed research strategy up to the definition of design opportunities, to conduct concept generation and select the most promising ideas, to develop innovative service ideas, to manage service prototyping and testing, and to visualize and present ideas to the client. We can't wait to see the results!