Spatial and service design: Guidelines defining university dormitories

Abstract

This paper contributes to the discussion about relationships between spatial and service design and how these two disciplines can interact and influence each other to achieve more complexity, capability and synergy in in a specific case such as university dormitories. Dormitories, university campuses, and schools, can be considered as urban community hubs through which synergistic relations between the institution and the surrounding neighborhood take place. The paper investigates how dormitories can, starting with the contribution of the students, perform strategic actions in the socio-cultural and civil regeneration of urban contexts. The aim is to delineate the various interactions and effective synergies, especially in relation to the most vulnerable and marginalized facets of the community, looking at the students’ dorm as places of social cohesion. The methodology is related to community-centered design using for example co-design tools to present relationships between spatial and service design particularly through the context of a collaborative design studio and the technical department of Politecnico di Milano.