Foretelling and Shaping the Future of Technology: the Role of Communication Designers in the Design of Innovation

his paper explores the role of communication designers in a multidisciplinary project team aimed to the development of smart systems (internet of things and digital solutions for public spaces), and it is based on a two year long experience during which the authors cooperated with researchers from academic and industrial institutions. In this experience, we faced the challenge of designing innovative solutions working with researchers characterized by different backgrounds, different expectations, values, priorities and design methodologies. To cope with this complex design context, and to exploit the potentials of the multicultural contributions, we experimented the early adoption of communication design tools and we demonstrated that the early production of video-scenarios illustrating meaningful aspects of the user experience, can be effectively employed to build a common ground in multicultural design teams, and to orient the development of innovative solutions toward a design driven process even in technology oriented project teams. We believe that, in order to produce desirable innovative solutions, the invention of metaphors, meanings and languages defining the aesthetic attributes of a digital product or system should be afforded before the definitions of the functional characteristics so to inspire and guide the following project steps.