Abstract:

The text analyzes the smart hospitality sector, investigating some extremely contemporary trends that integrate the digital, virtual and physical dimensions in an interplay of mutual implementations.

In particular, we intend to recall two specific experiences, the Design Hostel A letto con il design (Milan Design Week, 2017-2018) and the residency for artists called 72art-rooms (Shanghai, 2019); these experiences, in fact, are interesting for at least three factors:
- for the actors involved: an important Milanese university, corporate partners from the Lombard capital itself, but also a Chinese company and many young designers interested in the visibility offered by Milan Design Week and by the Chinese economic capital.
Specifically, the actors involved in these researches-actions were a group of researchers, a cultural association and a design studio, which entered into dialogue with a Chinese company to generate fruitful connections capable of experimenting with advanced models of hospitable and narrative places, in order to make people both guests and visitors.
- for the process activated: the relationship between university and companies has followed in both cases a virtuous process, which has been expressed once in a workshop with a competition of ideas and in a realization of the winning proposals, another time in a call with expression of interest and invitations. The students, in this way, were able to confront a feasibility issue (as they had to realize exhibitions in 1:1 scale) and they compared themselves to more experienced professionals, with whom they shared the challenge of realizing site-specific installations within two new hospitality formats. In these experiences, therefore, the link between education and the professional world appears fundamental; likewise, the international relationship activated between Italy and China is of extreme interest.
- for the planning and realization results achieved: both in Milan and Shanghai interaction design, interior design and art have found innovative convergences, configuring interactive installations/exhibitions that, however, have not renounced to a dialogue with the memory of the place (a memory of an industrial building in one case, of a historical dwelling in the other).

Straddling the line between hotel and museum, the two case studies under analysis have succeeded in exploiting the numerous multi-dimensional contributions typical of the discipline of design, in search of that functional, cultural and semantic hybridization that is typical of the contemporary.
The text therefore intends to focus on the design of experimental formats for accommodation facilities: innovative both for the fruitive modalities proposed, both for the inclusion of advanced technology, both for the unusual relationship between interior design and cultural heritage contents exhibition.

The research thus aims to explore, within the hospitality sector, a cultural and design synergy between Italy and China, between academic and professional practice, starting from a wide-ranging theoretical investigation of international best practices that are making hotels increasingly smart. In all the cases analyzed, it will be evident that the project is ncreasingly structured between tangible and intangible dimensions: it leads guests-visitors towards a new experiential design made of "instagramable moments".

Keywords:

Smart hotel, interaction design, experiential design, narrative hospitality.