Design and public space. The University campus' open spaces between rituality and non-normativity

The university campuses, in relationship with the sustainable development goals and with the contemporary criteria of urban quality in the public spaces, are nowadays configured as real grounds of experimentation for the design activities and for the strategies of urban regeneration: inclusion, security, sustainable growth and quality of services pass through the radical reinterpretation of the public spaces’ potentialities with reference to the deep changes in the access system to services and information for extremely different levels of users, more and more open source and based on sharing platforms. In this mark, and in a condition in which the necessity to define non-normative strategies for the social use of the spaces becomes stronger and stronger, the question arise as to how could the industrial design discipline and the new digital technologies give a contribution to enrich and strengthen these new forms of “social connection” between people and between users and places. The article aims to investigate the strategies through which new information and communication devices can improve the physical and social quality of the public spaces in the university campuses. Starting from the analysis of the relationship between people, space and new technologies, making reference to some specific study cases, the paper presents some design experimentations which constitute examples applicable also in the urban context, as far as the campus’ public spaces are seen as a common ground for the investigation of a new idea of city, more open, collaborative, accessible and based on a non-normative citizens’ participation.