The paper investigates some critical issues connected to the digitalization of products and systems for the domestic environments involving the collection of personal data. The research focuses on the most innovative solutions, such as those based on AI algorithms for speech recognition, IoTs, wearable devices, cloud computing, and the use of smart phones and devices. These solutions require and imply the collection of personal data and their local or remote processing. The paper provides a design-oriented discussion on the features of smart products with respect to the consequences of design choices on complex dimensions of experience such as sense of self, privacy, and personal identity. The paper aims to set out the terms of a discussion about the most critical factors of services and systems involving personal data, and to create references on the responsibilities of designers acting in multi-disciplinary project teams. The research is based on ethnography at home and on a critical discussion about case studies. The results highlight the importance of considering privacy and control issues in the design of smart solutions and provide some pointers to be used in the development of smart solutions for home.

Renewable energy sources are a great challenge for the future. Our ability to abandon the dependence on traditional sources strictly depends on them. The exploitation of these sources could be performed through an efficient integration of distributed generation units (solar, wind, etc.,) in electrical grids. This process has raised several issues in the global operation of the entire system. One of these issues is related to the possible failure of protection devices in case of fault, jeopardizing the safety of users and equipment. In this paper new methods and algorithms, which could coordinate intelligent protection devices in a smart grid scenario, are presented. The effectiveness of these new protection methodologies was assessed using a simulation of a distribution system (equipped with a distributed generation unit) in a "hardware-in-the-loop" setup. The protection methods were implemented in the simulation and exploited to efficiently protect the system during fault events.

Seen through the eyes of games, urban environments can appear as museums, storytelling venues, or intense multi-user experiences that could attract people away from their living rooms into the city. Engaging physical, social, and emotional levels, urban games emerge today as powerful resources, able to lead to a playful reading of the augmented city we live in. Observing recent play practices such as hybrid treasure hunts and geo-location games, several “patterns” can be noticed and recognized as new models for negotiating the density of urban landscapes in a physically and digitally mixed reality. Discovering and wandering across cities are dynamic patterns that invite the research and design community to consider the importance of retrieving the human ludic attitude to explore spaces; these can be recognized in “Rhabdomancy” and “Flânerie”, two interesting methods to design the augmented city. They perpetuate a constantly renewed playful relationship between places and human activities, offering to players - as modern citizens - an opportunity for actively participating in contemporary city-life.

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A Hostile World is a persuasive game designed for an urban context with a high level of multiethnic presence, a recurrent feature of the contemporary megalopolis. Our players are ordinary native citizens who are plunged into an alternative reality where they can realize how complex and demanding it is to deal with gestures and tasks of everyday life in a foreign context, trusting them to live a destabilizing experience that aims to increase the sensitivity, understanding, and empathy towards foreigners, soothing the existing multicultural tensions. The game is a quest-based system; quests recreate situations of everyday-life needs, from shopping to bureaucratic adventures; it's designed to be modular and its sessions may change in the number and quality of quests adapting to different cities, contexts, and targets. The authors identify its effectiveness through the analysis of data collected during and after actual gameplay.