🏭Manifattura Milano
Manifattura Milano, a digital platform as a tool to co-design a local model of Fab City Hub.
Online platforms are powerful tools to launch and sustain your FCH. Especially at the beginning of your experimentation process, they could help you in building and grow your community as well as to facilitate the interaction between the digital and physical aspect of your hub.
By reaching a large number of audiences , online platforms such as webpages , instagram account, or blogs can increase the visibility of your networks of actors as well as give resonance to their activities, which are related to your FCH , by sharing it with a widesread public.
In this way, design and develop an online platform dedicated to your FCH will help you foster the participation of more people and enterprises and strengthen the social inclusive aspect of your Hub .
What is this tool about and why is it relevant?
Manifattura Milano platform is here presented as an inspirational tool developed and implemented by the Milan Pilot Team during CENTRINNO. This platform, has been designed and developed as the dedicated platform to craftsmanship, urban manufacturing and the circular economy in the fashion and design sectors. The Milano team has been used this tool from the beginning of their experimentation with the following objectives :
Create an ecosystem of local businesses engaged and interested in develop circular processes in the production of their creations.
Disseminate the community's activities, give them visibility and thus strengthen it.
Set up a virtual space to collectively discuss needs and aspiration of circular producers and co-design a suitable and accessible spatial strategy for their neighbourhood and the city at large.
The platform was launched after the organisation of the Milan Fab City Camp, a significant first public event that served to the local team to officially launch their FCH's journey. The digital platform was a way to not losing the attention gained with Fab City Camp participants and to start to build a community around their needs.
Interested organisations and enterprises that want to be part of the Milan FCH community and its discussions around circularity, can subscribe via the platform by choosing different levels of engagement :
Subscribing to the newsletter
Publishing their events and getting promoted by the platform
Participating at working tables of the Milan FCH community
To join the community, the applicants should fill out a questionnaire describing the purposes and characteristics of their organisations/enterprises. In this way, the local team has a clearer idea of the applicants' needs and invite them to relevant on-line and/or in-person networking events and initiatives.
The tool is managed and constantly updated by a dedicated team from the Municipality of Milan in collaboration with Rete Nema. The direct engagement of public representants is a key element in assuring the success of the platform:
" since it is an initiative promoted by the Municipality is perceived as a public good and a tool enabling civic participation on subjects related to circularity."
The partnership with the Municipality demonstrate that there is a strong socio-political background that supports initiatives and work effectively to enable the creation of circular processes around urban manufacture.
Why this tool could be relevant (also) for your FCH ?
EMPOWER THE COMMUNITY
A digital platform such as Manifattura Milano will help you keep tracking of all the different activities going on in your communities and share it with them. The active use of the platform will foster the creation of connections among the different stakeholders, thus the community will result more empowered.
"Stakeholders are usually working in different areas of the city and don’t have the time and resources to keep updated or to network in order to create more impact" . ( words by Milan)
INNOVATIVE SPACE
The Manifattura Milano platform helped the local team to structure a FCH as a network of innovative spaces where actions are implemented by facilitated connections and collaborations among stakeholders in order to foster circularity at city scale.
SOCIAL ASPECT
It may serve also as a tool to increase the social inclusive aspect of your Fab City Hub. For example by increasing visibility, fostering collaborations and strengthen skills to more traditional and small companies which have to cope with rapid digital transformations, high prices of energies, always new ecological constraints.
The setting up and maintenance of Manifattura Milano platform allowed the local team in Milan to obtain the following outcomes :
→ create an innovative virtual space to discuss issues and co-design strategies for supporting local and circular manufacturing
→ create an innovative virtual space to support collective discussion about the prefiguration of possible FCH typologies. In Milan a local model of FCH is at the testing phase: rather than looking for a single space to have different kind of initiatives - happening in digital and physical space - coordinated among private and public actors to boost the entire city towards a circular evolution.
→ disseminate the community's activities and increase the pool of local businesses interested in circular processes
→ provide access to resources, promote events and networking activities around circularity for different stakeholders
Organisational Practices
The use of this tool contributed to the following changes in local organisational practices each of them may relate to some of the three foundational aspects of a FCH: Vision , Community and Infrastructure.
OP1. Activating interactions and facilitating connections and collaborations among the different actors active in urban environments
OP2. Access and connection to information, communities, projects and initiatives related to the local distributed creative and productive ecosystems
OP7. Facilitating community action, while orchestrating a common vision
OP8. Incremental design of space to create room for real and situated needs to emerge from the community
OP10. Multi-layered coordination combining physical spaces and facilities, with digital communication for diverse communities
Key Steps
Find here a list of suggested steps shared by the Milano Team for you to follow if you want to set up a digital space for your FCH.
Summary Table
Do you want to know more?
Here some useful links that you can look at if you want to better understand platform as tools for distributed ecosystems :
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