Designing contemporary living: a workshop bridging academia and building systems.

Designing contemporary living: a workshop bridging academia and building systems.

Within Xilia's research and development journey, collaborating with the academic world represents a natural extension of our project work: an opportunity to test tools, approaches, and visions in an open and experimental context.

The workshop launched with the students of the Design 3 course at the Sanremo Academy of Fine Arts fits perfectly into this framework. Led by professor Caterina Malinconico, the initiative was developed in collaboration with Urbanfile.

The project presents a concrete and highly relevant challenge: imagining an urban student residence in Milan, conceived not merely as a living space, but as an infrastructure capable of activating relationships, generating connections, and contributing to the overall quality of the urban environment. Starting from a contextual analysis, students are challenged to develop proposals that seamlessly integrate sustainability, accessibility, and flexibility. They will address core themes such as urban regeneration, the relationship between public and private spaces, and new forms of collective living.

Within this process, Xilia assumes a specific and operational role: acting as the technical partner for interior development. The projects will be designed using Xilia systems, introducing a design logic based on real, modular, and applicable elements right from the educational stages.

This approach bridges the gap between academic projects and a concrete reality, ensuring that design is not just a theoretical exercise but directly confronts the constraints, possibilities, and tools typical of professional practice. The use of these systems thus becomes an integral part of the creative process, guiding choices and opening up new design solutions.Furthermore, the workshop is enriched by the contributions of Urbanfile, Vitruvio, and Dodecaedro Urbano, fostering a shared workspace where diverse areas of expertise intertwine.

Experiences like this reinforce the concept of design as an open platform: a process where research, education, and practical application mutually feed into one another, generating value for both the students and the professional world.

For Xilia, working alongside academies means exactly this: building connections between vision and reality, providing concrete tools to imagine and realize new ways of living.