Cross-cultural design attitude: open-ended design solution for welcoming the Diversity

Italy draws lots of refugees from the Mediterranean regions: in 2010, Milan received more then 850 people in its welcomely Centres. Municipalities, citizens but also professionals must be involved in the collective answer to such a kind of phenomenon. The ephemeral nature of the settlement in the Centres, the precarious conditions of staying, as well as the variety of tenants’ identities (multi-ethnical and gender turns) shape a new research field of great, social, importance which challenges the designer to imagine new strategies and tactics for collective living. These reasons convinced a multi-disciplinary group (designers, social workers and environmental psychologists) to start a dialogical process, addressed to redefine characteristics and qualities of host-structures for asylum seekers and refugees, in Milan. The diversity of disciplines shared methods of analysis and interpretative models, whose availability was granted by designers’ work. The research methodology is inspired by a recent approach of AR, called pro-occupancy, which considers target-need as a complex system made by tangible and intangible queries. The research process feeds, in a circular way, the final year studio of the Interior Design BA (Politecnico di Milano): students developed scenarios and practical solution to rethink the current “state of art” of the Centres.