The brief
A real stakeholder wanted to open an innovation hub in Ticino: a physical place where companies, suppliers, brands, institutions and the university would sit in the same building. We were asked for an advanced solution to put inside that environment — and, separately, for a way to launch the place and make local residents aware of it.
Two briefs in one, then: something for the people already inside, and something for the people who don't know it exists yet. They pull in different directions, and the project ended up answering both with different products.
Looking at co-working spaces that work
We visited and analysed existing spaces before designing anything. LOGIN in Milan reads as minimal, flexible, essential. BASE, also in Milan, reads as a cultural and creative community — quiet and comfortable, but with a dynamic atmosphere. Same category, opposite personalities.
The benchmark then compared spaces on four dimensions: flexibility, access, pricing and interactivity.
Two dimensions out of four
We dropped two of them. Flexibility and pricing are decided by whoever runs the building — the furniture, the floor plan, the rate card — and nothing we designed was going to change them. Access and interactivity were the two we could actually build for.
That narrowed the project to a specific claim: the hub's problem isn't the desks, it's that people sitting in the same building don't know who else is there or what they do.
Three findings pointed the same way: the community needed a platform to connect through, the building needed easy access to itself and its services, and the users needed to be interconnected rather than merely co-located.
Who would be in the room
Five groups: freelancers, lifestyle brands, student trainees, service providers and occasional goers. Freelancers and brands are the two we mapped in depth, down to the roles inside them — analysts, content creators and digital consultants on one side; product, project, marketing and e-commerce managers on the other.
The brand positioning map placed the existing spaces on two axes, traditional to contemporary and refined to anonymous. Coffice, LogIn and CoWo sit on the traditional side; Base and Copernico are contemporary but anonymous; Regus is the closest to where we wanted to be. We positioned the project beyond it: contemporary and refined, aimed at young or already established companies.
Three products, one idea
The concept: an interactive network that makes professional relationships inside the community visible. It shipped as three separate things.
A mobile app to book rooms, share car rides, follow the event calendar and chat with people in the building. A projected data visualisation, the Cluster board, showing in real time who is where. A social photo filter carrying the message "be part of the cluster", which is the answer to the second half of the brief — the one about the people outside.
The filter is the odd one out, and deliberately so: two products serve the members, one serves recruitment. The benchmark for it wasn't other co-working spaces but branded filters from Kraft, Lowe's and a regional tourism board.
The scanner that doesn't lock anything
Each member has a unique code in the app, read by a scanner at every access point in the building. The decision worth naming is what the scanner is for: it doesn't restrict entry to an area. It exists to generate the data visualisation.
That reframes a piece of hardware everyone recognises. The same badge reader that normally means "you may not go in here" instead means "the room now knows you're in it". A person scanning in for the first time appears on the board as a new node; scanning somewhere else moves the node into that area's cluster and changes its colour. The size of the node grows with how active that person is in the community.
The board is projected in the relaxation areas rather than the work areas — the places where looking up from your screen is the point.
It also carries two things that have nothing to do with presence: the next event, and who is leaving soon with a free seat in their car, with the destination and how many places are left.
The app and the brand
The app architecture stays deliberately small: five destinations in the bottom menu — home, access, community, profile, notifications — and the transactional things people only do occasionally, booking a room, car pooling, the event calendar, tucked into a side menu. Access is a first-class destination because without it you can't get through a door.
The identity is built on the same bubbles as the board, so the logo is the data visualisation seen from far away. Dark grey with two cyans, set in DIN — positioned, in the team's own words, between refined and elegant.
Seen in motion
[DA COMPLETARE: una o due righe su cosa mostrano i video.]
Where it stopped
The project ran from concept to a working prototype, through several rounds of iteration, and ended in a live demo.
[DA COMPLETARE: cosa faceva davvero il prototipo alla demo — la proiezione era generata da uno scanner reale, da dati finti, da un video? L'app era navigabile o statica?]
[DA COMPLETARE: il tuo ruolo dentro il team di tre. Le slide ti indicano come interaction designer & engineer: dì cosa hai fatto in concreto.]
[DA COMPLETARE: cosa è successo dopo — lo stakeholder ha portato avanti qualcosa? E cosa non ha funzionato, o cosa rifaresti diversamente.]
One thing is worth being honest about now: a board that shows where every person in a building is sitting is also a board that shows where every person in a building is sitting. The project treated presence as something people would want to share. Whether they would is a question we never put to them.
