The Visitor Journey: A data-centric inquiry into the impact of Milan Design Week

The paper presents an original methodology, called the “visitor journey”, developed within the research project “Milan Design (Eco)System” for exploring the impact of a large-scale event — namely, the Milan Design Week — on the urban environment of the city of Milan in Italy. In this context, we proposed and experimentally implemented this method by using real-world urban data obtained through collaborations with seven city and regional data holders across several domains (air and rail passenger flows, hospitality, urban mobility, public safety, waste management, energy consumption). This impact exploration returned a rich picture of Milan Design Week’s impact, encompassing the global and local dimensions of this hallmark event. The resulting insights, partially reported in this paper, confirm the event’s attractiveness to international visitors, hinting in particular at business and high-spending profiles. At the same time, data highlight the event’s peak pressure on urban services, particularly public transport and other means of urban mobility. Moving beyond these insights, the paper discusses the method's potential and limitations, framing it as a practice-based case study of how permanent and temporary systems within an urban environment can be connected, thus offering a new perspective on event impact as a central element of systemic design practice.