Cortili in azione empowers residents in the Nichelino and Sangone neighborhoods of Turin, Italy to transform the schoolyard into communal spaces through collaborative and participatory design methodologies. This allows children, parents, teachers, and residents to exchange knowledge and experiences, have fun, and strengthen the social fabric of a commuter town.
Local
Italy
Turin
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2023-03-31
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Sheldon.studio Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Matteo Last name of representative: Moretti Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Designer & Founding partner Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: via dei Portici, 70 Town: Bolzano Postal code: 39100 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 339 124 3736 E-mail:matteo@sheldon.studio Website:https://sheldon.studio
Name of the organisation(s): Architettura senza frontiere Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Annalisa Last name of representative: Mosetto Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Vice President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Ottavio Assarotti 15 Town: Turin Postal code: 10122 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 347 600 7808 E-mail:annalisa.mosetto@gmail.com Website:https://asf-piemonte.org
Cortili in azione is a project born within the Wonder initiative, funded by Compagnia San Paolo to encourage collaboration between designers and non-profit organizations in the Turin area. The project was a collaboration between Architettura Senza Frontiere Piemonte (ASFP) and Sheldon.studio (SS) and was carried out from May 2022 to the recent final event in the Nichelino and Sangone school districts.
A team of designers, educators, architects, and an environmental psychologist worked with three different audiences – primary school pupils, their parents, and neighbourhood residents – to form a “community of place”. This concept refers to a group of people who share a common vision to transform the schoolyard into a common good, a shared space for the entire neighbourhood, instead of just a space for school pupils.
These transformative processes can only occur if neighbourhoods and politics work in synergy, which can be challenging and full of obstacles. Therefore, ASFP and SS developed custom strategies and methodologies to facilitate the encounter between people and the local administration, stimulating a feeling of belonging and the emergence of a shared vision.
Participatory desgn
Participatory Data Physicalisation
Collaboratove design
Schoolyard
Commons
The project aimed for two types of sustainability objectives:
Project sustainability
Community leaders (school headmaster, parent representatives, associations) were involved in designing certain aspects to ensure the community's continued involvement in the project's development and maintenance.
Environmental sustainability
Participatory Data Physicalization interventions (see upcoming paragraphs on methodology) aimed to encourage children to think holistically and in post-anthropocentric terms, connecting their well-being to that of the environment. This fostered a sense of belonging and appropriation of the public space, as children felt part of the schoolyard, and felt the schoolyard as a part of their lives.
Cortili in azione's subtitle "La Bellezza come bene comune" (Beauty as a common good) highlights the central role of beauty in the project. Beauty was a value emphasized in all aspects of the project, from communication to implementation, and served as the catalyst for community activation processes. Beauty was the lens that enabled participants to view the often neglected spaces in a transformative manner. The community was encouraged to care for their places and restore their beauty, improving the quality of life for everyone.
Design played a crucial role in creating an engaging and accessible visual identity for the project, as can be seen in the communication materials that effectively helped to engage the different members of the community. The impact was very positive. The community was not used to receiving such carefully designed materials.
The Participatory Data Physicalization (PDP) sessions were also characterized by attention to communication and beauty. PDP, an emerging field related to data visualization, involves materializing data, often in public spaces, making it tangible and alive. In Cortili in azione, PDP sessions were used to show the results of children's discussions on climate and social issues in their daily lives. The responses were not verbal, but recorded as decorative elements in the schoolyard, such as fabric around trees, flags, planted flowers, and coloured stamps. These visual representations served as both a reflection of the discussions triggered by the PDP sessions and a warning of the issues raised.
The Participatory Data Physicalization (PDP) sessions promoted inclusiveness. Children were asked questions with a post-anthropocentric approach, encouraging them to reflect on the topics of inclusiveness and interdependence in relation to caring for one’s schoolyard. At the same time, the PDP sessions helped children connect the schoolyard, understood as a natural ecosystem, to their daily life, highlighting the importance of ecosystem, interdependence, and inclusion in personal, family, and school spheres.
The community of citizens involved consists of the people living in the neighbourhood, with a specific focus on children and their families.
Children
More than 500 children were involved in the project, and their feedback helped to inform the design. The children were involved through a series of courtyard parties, which took place over a full day, on a public holiday, in order to maximise participation. During the schoolyard party, they were able to participate in Participatory Data Physicalization (PDP) sessions that allowed them to understand what was important in the schoolyard, what makes them happy and what they would like in their own schoolyard.
In addition, the children were involved in several educational workshops during school hours, in which they participated in additional PDP sessions. These made it possible to collect quantitative and qualitative data with respect to the children's perceptions of their bodies and nature. In parallel, the PDP sessions helped the children to reflect on nature and environmental issues from a post-anthropocentric perspective.
Parents
More than 100 parents took part in the project, mainly during the schoolyard parties. Through a PDP session, parents were asked whether they were satisfied with their schoolyards and, if not, whether they were willing to give support to transform them. On the basis of the collected adhesions, the group of volunteers was involved in a co-design session to lay the foundations of possible transformative interventions, in conversation and collaboration with both the teaching and administrative staff.
Neighbourhood associations
More than 10 associations were involved in the project during the courtyard festivals. Six workshops were activated and made it possible to create or strengthen a link between the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and the active associations.
Cortili in azione involved only local stakeholders, those mentioned in the previous answer, who were also the beneficiaries of the project. In fact, it is a participatory design, in which the beneficiaries have an active part in the design for them.
Several disciplines are put into practice to bring Cortili in Azione to life
PDP Participatory data physicalization
This is an emerging field that comes to life from Data Visualisation, to materialise data. These become tactile, physical, come to life in public space and specifically in schoolyards. Real traces left by the children, answers to questions and reflections in the form of traces on the trees, on the walls, on all the surfaces of the schoolyard.
At the same time, the PDP is not just a playful tool for collecting data, but an excellent expedient for getting participants to reflect on the proposed themes (Moretti, Mattozzi, 2019).
Participatory Design
Originating in the 1970s in Scandinavia, it has become particularly popular again in the last ten years. It consists of the inclusion of the project recipients in the design process. This avoids the pitfalls into which a certain type of design has always fallen, supporting instead a bottom-up dimension. This makes it possible both to include all the requests brought forward by the recipients, and indirectly to stimulate a feeling of ownership towards the project. The latter is a particularly important aspect as far as the sustainability of the project is concerned once the designers hand over leadership to the neighbourhood community.
Architettura Senza Frontiere Piemonte has been involved in the design of participatory spaces for many years, just as Sheldon.studio carries out research into approaches and strategies for designing in the social sphere through data. The two organisations therefore worked collaboratively to create a project that would meet the needs of the neighbourhood and its inhabitants.
Thanks to the schoolyard open events and parties, the project was able to directly impacted various groups in the local community around the Sangone and Disney schools in Nichelino near Turin. In the following paragraphs we provide a more detailed overview of how each community has been impacted.
Children
The project involved around 550 children from the Sangone and Disney schools in the town of Nichelino, near Turin. During some events, the children have been involved all together, such as during the first PDP action “Tell the Tree”. In other occasions, the project worked with smaller groups made of a single class, for example during the PDP sessions on the schoolyard as a metaphor of the planet.
Parents
The project involved the parents of the children as well. About a hundred parents participated in the first PDP action. Subsequently, the project engaged with a smaller group of parents’ representatives, to kickstarted the process of setting up the working group that will continue assuring a public reuse of the schoolyard.
Neighbourhood associations
More than 10 neighbourhood associations have brought their activities into the schoolyard open events. With these associations,the project team established the foundations to assure a future reuse of the schoolyard.
Indirect impact will be measured in the course of the upcoming year.
Overall
Thanks to the festivals and various workshops, the different groups of citizens were able to recognise themselves as a community of place, also united by the desire to give the schoolyard a new use and function. After a year of work, the leadership of the project is now handed over to the community and the schools, so that they can take forward what they have co-designed together.
Cortili in Azione fits into that niche of bottom-up participatory design for the well-being of neighbourhoods and citizens. There are no similar projects or actions at mainstream level, rather there are several initiatives at European level. It is difficult to compare them: being social projects, the complexity involved is very high, due to cultural, social political and design specificities. One could say that each project is stand-alone. In light of this, the innovative character of Cortili in Azione is linked to the Participatory Data Physicalization methodology, which made it possible to interact and give voice to the children first and foremost, as well as to the parents and citizens of the neighbourhood. This is an innovative methodology that is still little explored from a scientific point of view, especially with regard to the social dimension. Thanks to the Participatory Data Physicalization methodology, the project was able to collect qualitative and quantitative data in a way that is not possible through traditional projects - where qualitative and quantitative data are collected through questionnaires, focus groups or interviews. For example, PDP made it possible to collect data among groups usually excluded or difficult to investigate, such as children, while also leaving a physical mark within the spaces, serving as a warning and reflection also to people not directly involved in the data collection. A real social device to support greater environmental and social awareness.
From the design point of view, the primary methodology was that of collaborative design, described above, which made it possible to bring together and give voice to a diverse range of people and professions. The collaborative design came to life thanks to a series of workshops involving both the professionals directly involved and the domain experts. Thanks to the workshops, it was possible to give voice to all possible demands, from data access to those related to inclusive language.
A second methodology called Participatory Data Physicalization (PDP) made it possible to collect quantitative and qualitative data in a playful and light-hearted manner, while also supporting the participants in reflecting on the topics covered by the project. PDP is currently an engaging and playful practice, where data are provided and physicalized by community members, which has great potential of informing and engaging participants on specific issues. While attention has been given to the practice of physicalisation of data, e.g. by Jansen et al. (2015), the benefits and limitations of a participatory approach were scantly studied. In this context, PDP opens up new scenarios in the field of data visualisation, transforming it into:
• A tool for social interaction
• A tool for real-time analysis of the social behaviour of small groups.
• A new tool for informing and reflecting
The project is heavily based on participatory and collaborative design processes, therefore its characteristics can’t be automatically replicated as-they-are, being so dependent on the places and communities involved. What can be easily reproduced however is the methodology of intervention in public spaces through Participatory Data Physicalization and the physical representation of data and personal experiences. In fact, this is a strong goal of the project and the team has developed a solid documentation to facilitate the reproduction of the activities, which can thus cover other contexts and on other themes.
The project is deeply grounded on the local context: a specific schoolyard, shared by children of two specific schools, in two specific neighbourhoods of two specific towns. All the activities and the engagement strategies have been aimed at this specificity.
At the same time, though, the project touches upon themes of global relevance: how can children regain public space? how can we facilitate communities taking care of their common goods? How can local administrations listen to the needs a broad community of stakeholder, beyond those usually directly involved in politics? How can we leave a physical trace that stimulates a shared reflection on global challenges such as climate change, starting from the worries of the younger generations?
