THE PROBLEM
Connection doesn’t come naturally in a divided city 🧩
Milan wants change, but invisible social barriers still divide neighbourhoods. Research revealed three key issues:
WHY SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?
Milan is already speaking up: design just needs to meet it halfway. 🗣️
From protests in the piazza to untapped public spaces, Milan is full of potential for cultural connection. But invisible social barriers, outdated perceptions, and a lack of inclusive infrastructure keep that potential from becoming reality.
We saw an opportunity to design a system that doesn’t just showcase events, it invites participation, empowers immigrant voices, and reclaims the city as a space for everyone. Because belonging shouldn’t be limited to where you were born, it should be built into the everyday fabric of a city.
PERSONAS
Different stories, one shared need: connection. 🌍
HYPOTHESES
What we believed would make a meaningful difference 🧠
We believe that inclusive, interactive displays paired with simple, mobile-friendly tools will empower Milan’s diverse communities to participate, share, and feel seen in the city’s cultural life.
1.
Interactive visible, street-level public displays will increase awareness and participation in cultural events across diverse communities in Milan.
2.
A simple, mobile-friendly event creation tools to create events will empower immigrant communities to share their culture with confidence.
3.
Designing with empathy-driven features like personalized filters and multilingual access to reduce cultural divide.
DEEP SECONDARY RESEARCH
Uncovering the social tensions and hidden opportunities in Milan’s cultural landscape.
To understand what challenges were worth solving, we began by researching Milan’s social and cultural dynamics, focusing on issues of inclusion, perception, and public space. we scanned over 60+ sources, including news articles, urban studies, and community initiatives.
We uncovered recurring social tensions that helped shape the problem space:
1.
Immigrant neighborhoods like Via Padova were often stigmatized and associated with crime or danger
2.
Public spaces across the city were underused or lacked cultural relevance for diverse communities
3.
Grassroots efforts were beginning to reclaim these spaces, celebrate local culture, and boost visibility.
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
What’s Missing in Milan?
Through our secondary research and early discussions, we narrowed down our direction, defining a problem that reflected Milan’s unique cultural dynamics, outlined our target users and shaped a guiding design question to move forward with intention.
Core Issue
A lack of shared, accessible space, physical or digital, that promotes connection across generations and cultures.
Target User Groups
Older generations who value tradition and are hesitant to change
Younger generation residents who want to learn more and connect with new residents
Foreign-born residents eager to share their culture while integrating into the community
HMW
How might we celebrate intercultural exchange and empower foreign-born residents in Milan to integrate into the community?
EMPATHY MAPPING
Listening Before Designing
To better understand our users’ lived experiences, we created an empathy map based on recurring thoughts, behaviours, and feelings shared by both long-term Milanese residents and newcomers such as surfacing frustrations like feeling excluded, hesitant to engage, or unsure where they belong. During the process we uncovered key motivators: the desire to connect, share culture, and feel seen. This process helped me build a more human-centered foundation.
JOURNEY MAPPING
Two different lives. One shared need.
To build empathy, we created two detailed user profiles: Maria, a retired Milanese teacher who values tradition but feels cautious about cultural change, and Ahmed, a restaurant owner from Egypt seeking connection and visibility in the city. This process helped uncover key frictions around inclusion, digital confidence, and cultural representation.
BRAINSTORMING IDEAS
From Insights to Ideas
It was time to ideate. Our team gather for a structured brainstorm to explore how physical displays could bridge community gaps and quickly landed on the concept of a digital bulletin board. From there, we mapped out features like event discovery, public space rentals, and open notes to invite community voice while sketching interaction ideas, playing with location-based filtering, draggable tabs, and language accessibility.
ART DIRECTION & BRANDING
From Insights to Ideas
To reflect Milan’s rich cultural layers, we crafted a bold and joyful visual identity that blends traditional and contemporary aesthetics drawing inspiration from local signage, public installations, and Milan’s vibrant design history. The goal was to make the interface inviting across generations, playful enough to spark curiosity, yet structured enough to belong in public space.
Key Themes:
Lively & Bold
Fashionable
Connected & Civic
Celebratory & Joyful
For branding, we aimed to design in a way that felt distinctly Milanese and universally inviting. Drawing from previous inspiration, The Mosaic Milan identity was built to be flexible, bold enough to catch the eye in a city setting, but warm and inclusive to reflect the project’s community-centred mission.
USER FLOW PLANNING
From Street to Screen
We created a comprehensive site flow, mapping out key actions like browsing events, scanning QR codes, booking spaces, and leaving notes, ensuring each path felt intuitive across both in-person and digital touchpoints. This helped align our features with the needs of different user types and maintain a consistent user experience from screen to street.
MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
Laying the groundwork for interaction 🧱
USER TESTING + FEEDBACK
Putting ideas to the test 🧪
HIGH-FIDELITY & PROTOTYPING
Bringing it all to life✨
IMPACT & LEARNINGS
Designing Mosaic Milan was both energizing and humbling. 🌍
Designing Mosaic Milan taught me how deeply public design can influence connection, belonging, and everyday participation, especially in culturally rich but often overlooked neighborhoods.
Learned to approach urban design through a human-centered lens, focusing on inclusion, accessibility, and joy.
Discovered how to design with a community, not just for one—by listening closely to both what was said and what was left unsaid.
Received validation that speculative, culturally-grounded concepts can resonate when grounded in real user needs.
Refined my ability to scope a sprint while balancing ambition and feasibility.
NEXT STEPS
If Given More Time…
If given more time, our next step would be expanding this product into a companion website where users could log in, book spaces, and submit events with full details which is ideal for more complex tasks that are best done from a computer. This direction would allow organizers to upload marketing materials, confirm vendor bookings, and coordinate logistics, creating a complete event ecosystem. We’d also run a second round of usability testing focused on accessibility improvements and build out a basic design system to maintain consistency across the display and web interfaces.