Dinamo | complesso plastico

Experience on Made in Italy collective imagery

Interactive exhibition, Tangible interfaces, Collective imagery
Milano (IT) / Domus Academy, September - November 2007

Dinamo|complesso plastico is a project dealing with participative environments, tangible interfaces and collective imagery. It consists in a large database of images that represent singular elements of Made in Italy concept - put together starting from extensive ethnographies that were conducted at the beginning of the design process to explore this topic. The users can interact with Dinamo|complesso plastico through its tangible interfaces in order to create a collective representation of what does Made in Italy mean.

Brief / Concept

Fondazione Valore Italia is planning to open in 2012 a brand new museum of Made in Italy. The museum will be set up in Rome with the aim of better communicating the past successes and the present achievements of product research and development that is being carried out in Italy. By looking at the actual museum opening, the workshop participants are asked to design and implement itinerant interactive pieces that will bring around the world a preview of the museum exhibition.

Nomadic Exhibitions aim is to design an interactive piece that could work as a stand-alone communicative element, as well as an integrated part of a larger exhibition. Key elements in the brief are: enjoyment, scalability, easy maintenance, physical computing, tangible interfaces, quick prototyping.

Design Process

Extensive ethnographies and background research were conducted to collect elements to define which is the collective meaning of Made in Italy concept. The outcome of this phase consisted in a collection of patterns and stereotypes: passion, design, history, tradition, food, enjoyment of life, arts and several other elements.

Starting from such research, a massive imagery database was built and such images were clustered according to these categories: Folkore, Creativity, Innovation and Passion. By manipulating the installation’s tangible interfaces one can switch among categories, choose images and build a sequence that corresponds to the personal visions regarding Made in Italy. Such sequences are collected from each user - and compose in the end a Gestalt representation of Made in Italy history and values.

The full-scale prototype was built taking inspiration from the Intonarumori machineries invented by Luigi Russolo - Italian Futurist artist - the first synthetic music author in the history.