The International Summer School for Advanced Studies UniBS: CONTEMPORARY IDENTITIES. Interweaving Spaces and Relations in the Design of Living Services

The building design is including new features to focus on the users’ needs and to be responsive to the boundary conditions, which are nowadays marked by sustainability, energy consciousness, economic requirements, life cycle assessment. The International Summer School for Advanced Studies UniBS: Contemporary Identities adopted a multidisciplinary approach to extend the vision and the possibility to deploy the project with design competencies, off-site development of the construction phase, energy assessment and innovative systems, according to urban planning and rules. The goal is to pre-evaluate the design choices to avoid, or minimize, unexpected dissatisfaction factors that could be rise when the project is actually used by people. The Post-occupancy Evaluation is predicted, and anticipated, through Virtual Reality and Digital Tools to define the project. This approach strongly helps the designers to review the project and possibly can be used—and it is used in the most innovative and advanced project contexts—to exchange the hypotheses of design interference between different disciplines during the design phase, to explain the projects and understand the spaces for clients and end users. The ISS Contemporary Identities explored the possibility to adapt and extend a prefabricated housing unit provided by an Italian company Marlegno for different users and locations, including requirements related to the specific context and stakeholders. The ISS involved the University of Brescia, promoter of the initiative, TU Wien and University of Huddersfield. Students and Ph.D. candidates of the three universities worked together for one week in the resident workshop of the ISS in Brescia, Italy.