"Infoxication". Do you ever heard about this concept?

How can we decide if a news it's real or not (said that sources are often scarcely reported)? Do we have to rely on our own concept of "trust" in a person/institution? Are we going to create a collective wisdom or looseness?

I think it's just too serious to be left to an ads...

 

 

In these days in Milan, the Public Administration is having hard time deciding if blocking the private traffic during the next City Marathon or not. It seems so difficult to ask citizens (or probably those "angry drivers") to have an "open air Sunday"...

 

And my mind goes to the Ciclovia in Bogotà: it is a temporary recursive event which takes place every Sunday and holiday in the main streets of the city from 7 a.m to 2 p.m. 

Those streets are closed every Sunday to become huge bike lanes.

I'm talking about an event that takes place SINCE 1976!!! and is spread over more than 120 km, approximately involving 2 million people (30% of city population)…

 

Ciclovia was the model of many other carfare streets all around the globe (Italy excluded!) and were immediately accompanied by Recrovias, areas in which Aerobics and Yoga teachers and musicians give lessons.

 

An example of how to change the lifestyle of our cities with events which change also our sense of belonging to a community, improve our wellbeing and create new  jobs (watch the "bikewatchers" in the video).

 

And we are discussing to close few streets in the day of an international event...

Ciclovia: Bogotá, Colombia from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Considered as one of the 11 "best innovation and design books of 2010", the Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries" has been taken as a reference for an important part of this year Final Design Studio of the Master Course of Product Service System.

Introduced in our course by prof. Cabirio Cautela, the concept of "business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value" and it is foundamental for promoting a successful innovation.

Being a conceptual tool, containing those elements which express the company logic, the business model represents the final step of a focus shifting process in design: from the "tangible product" to the "intangible organization".

The Osterwalder-Pigneur's book offers a "canvas" to frame the analysis of existing business (or business "to be"), which is structured around a series of clusters related to: partnership relations, main activities, resources and value propositions, customer relationships and segment, communication and commercial channels and cost and revenue streams. 

The intent of the course was to make available the canvas to the students to test its potential as a tool for analysis and design.

I must confess my surprise at seeing the result of the work: with enthusiasm the students have transformed a rigid framework of analysis into an amazing design tool with a high communication potential.

In the picture just few examples of "interpretation" of the canvas, which transformed itself into element of "storytelling" without loosing its original tool structural sequence (compare it with the original one, please).

So ... let me give my congrats to prof. Cautela and all students for their excellent work, absolutely worthy to be publicly shared.

More info about the canvas on the authors website.

Every project dealing with food is considering "Zero Km" as a must-do consideration in framing a correct and sustainable intervention.

Zero Km is based on Andrea Paxton's definition of "food miles" - which refers to the distance food is transported from production to consumers. It refers to the ideal situation in which food is consumed right in the place in which is produced (unrealistic). Food miles are one factor used to determine the environmental impact of food and it is sometime reported as carbon emissions on food label.

Just to have an idea, the average meal travels for more than 1.900 km to arrive on our table. That's why every food related company is promoting "Zero Km" products, to give itself a "green halo".

Recent results of a research Martina Bartoli is doing for her thesis project - which I'm tutoring - show the limits of using the food miles as indicator of low environmental impact. In fact transportation is just one of the factor contributing to pollution - together with production, transformation, processing, breeding and packaging - and it is estimated to contribute for the 19% "only".

Transportation impact then varies a lot depending on the mean of transportation, from the 55kg per food ton of CO2 of a traditional ship to the 570kg per ton of a jet airplane.

From these considerations derives a contradictory and counterproductive situation: as if we compare 2 tons of lamb meat consumed by a Londonian, one arriving from New Zealand and one from the neighborhood of the city. In spite of the fact that the first comes in UK after a 18.000km long boat trip, it is far more "sustainable" than the local lamb meat: considering all factors the first produces an impact of 689 kg of CO2, while the second something like 2.848 kg.

images by Martina Bartoli