Design Jam Rome #1: Open-Design Spreads Across Italy. Let’s Jam!

A guest blog post by local champion, Cristiano Siri.

Design Jam Rome #1, a two-day community collaboration event focused on User Experience Design (UX), where designers, professionals and students – gathered in teams – end up with different solutions in terms of web and mobile applications in response to a common social challenge.

Design Jam Rome logo

Background

Based on a Mozilla initiative, this is the first two-day jam — which follows the a series of one-day events in London (UK), Oxford (UK), Chapel Hill (USA), Iasi (RO), Barcelona (ES) and Milan (IT).

The Topic

A challenge topic will be revealed the first morning of the workshop. The teams will discuss the issue proposed together with professional mentors. The topic itself has a social nature and it is relevant to the area. Being the issue planned together with an institution or NGO or no-profit organization, the team’s outputs will have an immediate local impact.

To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all outputs, visualizations and other contributions made during the day are shared globally under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses.

Who Should Attend?

Design Jams are for anyone who wants to improve their design, collaboration, brainstorming and presentation skills by tackling an interesting UX design challenge. It’s an open call for interaction designers, UX researchers, information architects, web and graphic designers, developers, product managers + more…. from students to experienced practitioners.

Event Details

Date: 2nd & 3rd of July, 2011

Time: July 2: 10-18.30 / July 3: 10-13.00

Venue: Technotown @ Villa Torlonia

Address: Via Lazzaro Spallanzani, 1/A, Rome (map)
Closest Tube: Policlinico (line B)

Registration

Registration is being handled via Eventbrite – is reserved to the first 30 persons who will book in.

Reserve your ticket, today @ http://designjamroma.eventbrite.com (ps. Design Jams are free events. The 10 euro fee will be refunded at the end of the workshop.)

Mentors

Luca Simeone

Luca Simeone is managing partner of Vianet and teaches design anthropology and interaction design at La Sapienza University and Ateneo Impresa Graduate Business School in Rome. He has published reviews and articles on design anthropology and ethnographic methods applied to design practices. He co-edited the books Beyond Ethnographic Writing (Armando, 2010) and REFF (DeriveApprodi, 2010) exploring new narratives that combine traditional writing with augmented reality technologies. In 2009 he founded FakePress, a think tank exploring the future of publishing and in 2011 he was a research affiliate with the SENSEable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge MA.
Web: http://www.luca.simeone.name

Salvatore La Rosa

Web: http://salvatorelarosa.posterous.com
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/salvatorelarosa

Dario Carrera

I’m PhD in Public Administration and Management, title of thesis “Creating social entrepreneurs. From civil society movements to social innovation: the role of the social enterprise incubators and centres for social innovation”, at University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, where I also teach “Management of Nonprofit Organizations” . While coaching 10 year olds on Roman football pitches, I’m member and coach of Liberi Nantes, costituita, sport association totally made up of refugees and forced migrants (the association is supported – free of charge – by the UNHCR). I’m member in Solidarity Finance association (www.finansol.it), co-founder of The Hub Milano and founder of The Hub Roma.
Web: http://www.hubroma.net

Local Champions & Supporters

This event would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of local champions and supporters:

Champions

Supporters

Sponsors

The Design Jam Roma team is ever grateful for the support from:

Updates

Follow @designjamroma or the #designjamroma hashtag on Twitter for all the latest news and updates (schedule, topic, activity, outputs etc.).

Also be sure to keep up to date via the following online channels:


What Are Design Jams

They are one-or-two-day design sessions, during which people will team up to tackle an engaging User Experience challenge. Similar to developer ‘hackdays’ the aim is to get enthusiastic local UX professionals, designers, and developers from both local technology and university sectors together to learn and collaborate with each other while working on a design problem.

Upcoming & Past Design Jams

Other scheduled Design Jams going forward include:

Past Design Jams since the inaugural event back in November 2010 include:

Want To Bring Design Jam To Your Town?

We’re actively on the lookout for more local champions around the globe!

Be sure to keep an eye on the global Design Jam Wiki for news of upcoming jam near you. If there isn’t one listed & you’d like to champion and run your own Design Jam please register your interest or email cyberdees[at]mozilla[dot]com.