Communication Design for Refugee Women: An Applied Research Project for Sammartini Polyfunctional Centre in Milan, in Studies in Material Thinking, vol. 15, 2016

Designers are increasingly called on to put ‘human experience’ at the centre of their act: in the design process the user needs, (explicit or latent) become more relevant than the configuration of artefacts. This design perspective, strictly connected to emotional and existential values, has as a result the production of tools and artefacts that are able to influence or transform real life (the material) and human relationships (the immaterial). The issue of women refugees’ reception, their practical needs and the problem of multilingualism constitutes the core of our project for the Sammartini Polyfunctional Centre of Milan. The final output of the research project (communicative artefacts designed to support the refugees throughout their period of stay at the centre) is the result of a combination of multiple human factors and experiences that affected all the actors involved: women refugees, representatives of institutional and non-governmental organisations, volunteers of the Centre, researchers and design students. The artefacts included in the toolkit are finalized to create paths of orientation in the Centre, to disseminate information, to enable the processes of social inclusion and the interaction between refugees and staff.