Spatial and Service Design: Guidelines Defining University Dormitories

Thispapercontributestothediscussionaboutrelationshipsbetween spatial and service design and how these two disciplines can interact and influence each other to achieve more complexity, capability and synergy in in a specific case such as university dormitories. Dormitories, university campuses, and schools, can be considered as urban community hubs through which syn- ergistic relations between the institution and the surrounding neighborhood take place. The paper investigates how dormitories can, starting with the contribution of the students, perform strategic actions in the socio-cultural and civil regen- eration of urban contexts. The aim is to delineate the various interactions and effective synergies, especially in relation to the most vulnerable and marginal- ized facets of the community, looking at the students’ dorm as places of social cohesion. The methodology is related to community-centered design using for example co-design tools to present relationships between spatial and service design particularly through the context of a collaborative design studio and the technical department of Politecnico di Milano.