-IT services are built on top and are delivered by (and therefore depend upon) IT infrastructures. The design of the latter is critical, since it will influence the overall quality of IT services. However, designing IT infrastructures for large organizations is a challenge task since it requires knowledge of existing organization processes, the views of different players, and the conjunction of technical expertise in different domains, that rarely reside in a single individual. To improve the design of IT infrastructures, namely by allowing to reuse proven solutions to recurrent problems we propose the use of IT infrastructure patterns. The use of patterns in the design of IT infrastructure will provide several benefits such as facilitate the communication among IT design stakeholders, simplify the whole design process and potentially decrease size and complexity, which all contribute to increase the quality of IT service management processes. This paper present the preliminary effort to build supplierindependent IT infrastructure patterns and we introduce two of them, covering aspects from its rationale to instantiation that will hopefully leverage the IT infrastructure design process and create a positive impact in the quality of IT service management processes trough proven and better designed IT infrastructures.

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The main purpose of this project is the development of a multifunctional artificial foot, capable of duplicate a human foot in a laboratory environment, in order to evaluate and simulate footwear's performance under certain conditions. This foot is used as a laboratory prototype and is multisegmented, in order that each section is controlled independently in terms of heat generation and sweating rate, therefore it is possible to simulate more accurately the real behaviour of a human foot. The device produces thermal insulation values that will help to design footwear with better ability in terms of thermal comfort, replacing human volunteers in thermal comfort perception tests, which are very subjective. The prototype was already tested, and preliminary results indicated that thermal insulation values are within the range of expected values produced by other foot thermal manikins and by human volunteers' tests. This fact suggests that this lab prototype can be used in future thermal comfort evaluations.

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