Food waste is one of the main problems in our society. This is mainly caused by people’s behaviors and attitudes, which influence the whole food chain, from production to final consumption. In fact, food is generally perceived as a commodity by adults, who transmit this behavior to children, who in turn do not develop any consciousness about food’s source. One way to reduce the problem seems to be by changing consumers’ attitudes, which develop during the early years of childhood. Research has shown that after attending school garden classes, children’s food-related behavior changes. Growing crops is not always easy—it can’t be done in the domestic space, and this lead to a loss of the long term positive effects. This paper presents a project that tries to teach children how to grow their own food indoors and outdoors, mixing real and virtual reality, connecting something natural like a plant to the Internet of Things (or IOT, a network of physical objects virtually connected to each other and to the web). The use of sensors related to an app makes this process more fun and useful for educational purposes. The aim of the project is to change children’s attitude towards food, increasing their knowledge about production and consumption, in order to reduce waste on a long term basis. The research has been developed in collaboration with Cisco NL and MediaLAB Amsterdam. The user testing has been executed with Dutch children in Amsterdam.

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Currently Smart Lighting is mostly oriented toward energy savings and road luminance control to acknowledge actual maintenance, weather and traffic conditions, with the target to satisfy drivers visual needs. Alternative applications of smart lighting are toward city beautification and do not have normative constraints toward users safety and visibility as instead are required for road lighting. The paper present two case study of smart lighting systems for C lighting class road, outcome of a project set up by Politecnico di Torino and INRIM aimed to define new approaches to design smart controls consistent with user's and society needs and to define and assess their metrological performances and calibration requirements.

The 3D laser scanning technology has been reached by more and more users in the last years, thanks to a new market of low cost devices, more affordable for simple, non-professional use. The educational use is one of such environments, and its didactics purposes gives the opportunity to test new technology from a variety of different point of views. 3D laser scanning, for example, is very promising in environments like Design university education, where the control of the shape of an object is one of the topics discussed in courses, and one of the main focuses of the product design profession. This paper describes the use of this technology in students and research lab, and its metrological characterization, especially on the relationship between performances and object optical characteristics (like gloss and color), object position and ambient lighting. It is to keep in mind that, in a student lab, geometry reverse acquisition is one of the activities done to understand products layout: the knowledge of influences of surrounding and material characteristics on scanner performances is a key factor to improve the performance when low cost scanner are involved. The characterization performed gave the opportunity to students to test how such devices work, the output reliability, which are the inherent issues and what kind of strategies should be introduced to enhance the scanning quality, indeed one of the main problems of these low cost devices. The Working EnvironmentThe lab involved in this research is the virtuaLABPolitecnico di Torino Design Center, ITALY: it is a lab where students and researchers join to share their skills, in order to develop new strategies for industrial product design, environmental issues related to their production and new approaches to improve this Design and field. Open Source tools, open hardware, content production sharing and the connection with local FabLabs are some examples of the idea defining the activities developed in the lab [9].One of the main goals is to focus the attention on people, their connection with other people and with the local area Design and production professionals, artisans and facilities.The power of 3D printing is day by day spreading in everyday life and some new production approaches are growing and giving people new opportunities to get in touch with design production [1]. For this reasons virtuaLAB has adopted a low cost didactic/research strategy, not acquiring high-end technologies, preferring to test and use everyday devices, giving students and researchers the opportunity to create local activities related to the masses, thus choosing new development strategies for micro or even personal production assets.The laboratory is equipped with five FDM 3D printers and one 3D scanner for reverse geometry acquisition: with these devices, easy to use, to modify and to re-release in different layouts, people working in the lab are able to test and develop different new product making approaches. Because of their studies, Design students have too much c...

The complex relationship between man and technology is the starting point of an interesting design process, aiming to highlight the lack of awareness in most of the behavioral choices of man. Man is distinguished by its nature of fi nding short-term solutions, with the almost complete inability to prefi gure long-term eff ects resulting from his unconscious decisions. Technology, on the other hand, is developing fast, becoming day by day more potentially uncontrollable. Specifi c attention is given to the innovations that can cause unpredicted impacts on human life: knowing history by its sociological implications allows us to recognize some recursive patterns that can then be transformed into opportunities. The goal is not an attempt to predict future trends in technological innovation but to fi nd the right formulas in order to raise the level of responsibility in individuals' behavior. In this paper the role of the designer is analyzed within the technology of 3D printing, enhancing its potential ability of changing both technological and human environments. A fi rst answer to the problems triggered by 3D printing can be found, for example, in the positive phenomena that are activated within collaborating groups by sharing space and knowledge, in communities with a bottom-up approach, where the designer is actively involved.Keywords: human factors, ethics, awareness, 3D printing, rapid manufacturing, behaviors, transdisciplinarity, re-thinking, re-making, metadesign. ResumoA complexa relação entre o homem e a tecnologia é o ponto de partida de um processo de design interessante, com o objetivo de destacar a falta de consciência na maioria das escolhas de comportamento do homem. O homem se distingue por sua natureza de encontrar soluções em curto prazo, com a impossibilidade quase total de prefi gurar efeitos em longo prazo resultantes de suas decisões inconscientes. A tecnologia, por outro lado, se desenvolve rapidamente, tornando-se a cada dia mais incontrolável. Atenção especial é dada às inovações que podem causar impactos imprevisíveis sobre a vida humana: conhecer a história por suas implicações sociológicas nos permite reconhecer alguns padrões recursivos que podem ser transformados em oportunidades. O objetivo não é uma tentativa de prever tendências futuras em inovação tecnológica, mas de encontrar as fórmulas certas, a fi m de elevar o nível de responsabilidade no comportamento dos indivíduos. Neste trabalho, o papel do designer é analisado no âmbito da tecnologia de impressão 3D, aumentando a sua capacidade potencial de mudar os ambientes tecnológico e humano. A primeira resposta aos problemas desencadeados por impressão 3D pode ser encontrada, por exemplo, nos fenômenos positivos que são ativados dentro de grupos que colaboram através da partilha de espaço e do conhecimento, em comunidades com uma abordagem bottom-up, onde o designer está ativamente envolvido.Palavras-chave: fatores humanos, ética, consciência, impressão 3D, produção rápida, comportamentos, a transdisciplinaridade, repensar...