Abstract:

At Domus Academy, Experience Design academic unit, our aim is to merge Technology with Vision, Culture, and Branding, in order to create and improve our everyday life and to envision possible future scenarios. We have a people-centered design approach that aims to respond to the growing need of creating and delivering original contents to different fields, from Visual Brand Design to Service and Interaction Design.

The academic path that Domus Academy offers to the students is a one-year master divided into 4 main workshops and a professional experience. Domus Academy methodology permits to our students to choose their professional paths and the workshops that are more aligned with their skills and aspirations. This occasion gives us the opportunity both to push the creation of hybrid figures in the field of Design, and to develop projects merging different disciplines.

Through two different projects as best practices, this paper will present the design process that our students approached during our workshops of "Experience Design" and "Identity Design".
The projects show that a new design toolset and new techniques are necessary to reach and engage the audience in the digital age. For this reason, we have to design a specific role for every part of the system in order to catch the user’s attention and make accessible the right information at the right time. As designers, we need to offer an integrated and overlapping sense of experience able to increase the relationship between users, services, products and the environment that surrounds us.

The first project “Piazzetta” for Casa Martini company was developed during the workshop in the field of Visual Brand Design. It will show how transmedia strategies nowadays are fundamental in order to promote a product and to create brand awareness. The students developed a transmedia system able to promote a series of events by physical, digital and social media platforms. The second project, “Kife”, was in collaboration with Accenture Digital. We asked the students to envision scenarios on the future of Money. They developed a digital wallet for children with integrated parental monitoring board and financial literacy lessons to prepare children for their future.

Our aim, as designer and educators, is to develop process and experiment solutions able to enhance and simplify the multi-channel experience. Design should have a function of bridging Digital and Physical experiences making accessible intangible elements, as desire, needs and memories, translating them in physical actions and solutions useful for our future.

Keywords:

Design, process, experience, branding, project, disciplines, digital, service, interaction, communication, visual.