Open Air Generations. Design Social Sustainable environments

On dictionary 'public' is 1) ‘done for’ a population or a community as a whole, 2) opened to everybody. In the Design matter, what is a 'community'? What is a 'person'? What means develop 'open' something? These concepts involve connected to three crucial features of contemporary society. a) Role of the metropolitan areas – where the digital communication opportunities totally deconstructed the dichotomy public/private. b) The constant growing of a multigenerational population – which refuse any standardization of services and products. c) The need to develop a more sustainable way of life – especially considering the relationship between human behaviors and ‘environmental rhythms’. The paper reports a research and didactic project focused on these topics in order to identified and investigated a new meaning of ‘public’. The research elected the ‘outdoor’ space as consumption context, where re-discovering a different public dimension thanks to products and services developed according to three key-words: sociality, wellbeing and energy. Energy, in the outdoor context, refers to nature as a resource in terms of sustainability and conservation. Wellbeing refers as mental factor connected with the concept of awareness. Finally, the research investigated the concept of sociality, as a spontaneous human action, for its possible critical points, especially the safety of living among other people.