NABA, in collaboration with OpenDot, the Fab Lab, research and open innovation hub, presented Future Fields - Urban farming for the Milan of Tomorrow, the online hackathon born to re-think the future of urban agriculture through speculative design, the method that aims at raising real questions onto the new directions we will take in the times to come. This initiative is part of the European project OpenAgri, of which the Municipality of Milan and the Chamber of Commerce of Milan MonzaBrianza Lodi are in charge.
Future Fields involved 35 students from NABA’s six didactic Areas, working in teams to create projects that imagine plausible scenarios and urban agriculture systems for the Milan of 2025. The ideas, between design and fiction, have been collected in a report from the future, to stimulate the conversation and the reflections on their consequences in social, cultural, economic and technological fields.
Guido Tattoni, NABA Dean, Luca Poncellini, NABA Design and Applied Arts Department Head and Claudio Larcher, NABA Design Area Leader, took part to the workshop as mentors along with urban agriculture experts such as Felipe Hernandez (Hexagro), Henry Gordon-Smith (Agritecture), Alessandro Arioli and Patrizia Guglielmotto (Aquaponix), and Andrea Patrucco (Municipality of Milan).
The project, introduced by a schedule of contents and activities, developed in a whole week of digital work, with the support of mentors and OpenDot’s tutors, to be completed by the live streaming presentation of the projects, awarding the best proposals by NABA students, on OpenAgri’s and OpenDot’s social media.
Congratulations to the students Letizia Bultrini and Ilaria Sacchi of the MA in Visual Design and Integrated Marketing Communication, Elena Cusini and Andreea Popescu of the MA in Design and Leonardo Bosatra of the BA in Media Design and Multimedia Arts who won the first prize with their project “Piantala”; and congratulations to the students Elena Zecchin of the BA in Graphic Design and Art Direction, and to Elena Ferrando and Miriana Leuci of the MA in Product and Service Design that won a webinar package offered by the Chamber of Commerce with their project “Hedera”.