Pilot project presentations: T.Ospito

Speakers meeting link: https://bit.ly/36uVRwF | Meeting attendants: Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/designscapesproject/

17:30-17:45 Welcome and introduction
(Besnik Mehmeti, ANCI Toscana)
17:45-18:15 Presentation of the pilot project[T.Ospito team: Liat Rogel (quick introduction), Elisa Saturno (presentation of the project)]
18:15-18:30 Q&A and Discussion
18:30 End

(*) Other winners of the Designscapes call with similar thematic orientation will be invited to contribute

Our speakers

Besnik Mehmeti has a distinguished expertise and a winning track record in securing and managing EU funded projects. He provides strategic advisory and funding opportunities to local and regional administrators, communities and businesses. His core areas are the promotion of innovation, technological development, entrepreneurship, creative and cultural industries. His ability to master complex and multilateral partnerships and initiatives led to the successful development and implementation of several innovative actions and partnerships at local and regional level.

Liat Rogel is founder and president of HousingLab, freelance service designer and design teacher.Liat holds a Phd in design from Politecnico di Milano with the topic of collaborative housing. She is a product and a service designer dealing mostly with social innovation and collaborative design.
In HousingLab, a laboratory for urban innovation in housing, she is facilitating and coaching the process of urban housing renewal. She is also responsible for Experiment Days – fair of collaborative housing, in Italy. Liat is consulting to different cities in the framework of European projects and since 2018 she is an URBACT Expert.

Elisa Saturno is a designer specialized in social design, collaborative economy and circular economy. Freelance based in Milan, since 2016 she has been working on the activation of public and cultural spaces through participatory architecture processes, and since 2017 she has been collaborating with European organisations to develop circular economy processes. Since 2019 she has been working on collaborative economy, and in particular community economy, through research, design and training activities.

T.Ospito is a project that aims to empower neighbourhoods to assist other people and the neighbourhood itself, by co-creating and co-producing activities through an online platform and with the support of associations and partners. The platform facilitates citizens with participative ideas to find like-minded groups to help them execute the activity, co-designing in teams. Besides, the people get support from associations and businesses through gaining resources and making their ideas real.

T.Ospito was born at Politecnico di Milano, developed by a group of students during their master in PSSD; before the end of the master, together with some teachers and tutors, they submitted their first application to Designscapes’s feasibility study. Originally, T.Ospito was intended as a service to support caregivers who would move to Milan for some months to take care of their families hospitalized at Niguarda; the support would come from the neighbourhood itself, that holds a long tradition of solidarity, in daily activities held together with local called “Amici di Quartiere” (local buddies).

Since then, the project has changed due to external conditions and insights coming from prototyping; the tests unveiled that the vulnerable people in Niguarda are not only caregivers, but also the locals, as well as the district itself. As a response, the team focused on the assisting neighborhood, which, amidst the pandemic, saw the rise of proximity aid that strengthened the relationships among community’s members. So, the service was reshaped and the whole community was to be empowered by creating initiatives for locals, neighbourhood and caregivers, of course.