Urban textiles, a design workshop

This discussion presents Urban Textiles, a design workshop with students from Politecnico di Torino in Ameno (Novara, Italy). By working with an ecodesign approach, the workshop led to the production of pieces of street furniture, by using waste material provided from local industries. Those products acted as info-design tools and gave local and incoming communities a new vision about the identity of the territory. The paper focuses on the performing feature of this design experience and how this approach increased the connections between landscape, people and industry. The Urban Textiles workshop is an example of an action-research process applied to specific territory: the skills of design are enhanced to explore the reality in which we work, to analyze the production processes and to introduce changes to create innovation.