Sergio Nava
Today, the metaverse and mixed reality are exerting a strong impact on both the fashion and design worlds. Fully understanding the opportunities becomes crucial to make the change underway more and more concrete and widespread. The designer’s task, according to Sergio Nava of the Marangoni Institute, is to “humanize” the transition.
According to Sergio Nava, Director of Education at Istituto Marangoni, the figure of the architect/designer is important and decisive, as the role of the designer is to make society accept and relate to technological changes through interfaces that allow these changes to be introduced into society. Today’s technologies bring drastic and epochal change; they will bring about the transition from analog to digital of many everyday experiences. The school’s task is to investigate how design, and the designer, can help and encourage change, humanizing it and bringing it closer to people.
Istituto Marangoni has carried out several projects that concretize this vision: for example, it has been collaborating with Snapchat for five: in 2022 Istituto Marangoni used Snapchat’s landmark technology to create the first augmented reality exhibition, geolocating furniture complements in the “Milano Design District” during the Fuorisalone. This year, also at the Salone del Mobile, the School of Design leveraged the same technology to build an augmented reality garden at Vanity Fair’s Social Garden event.
In 2021/2022 Istituto Marangoni has created its metaverse, within which students can interact and attend workshops. Building a metaverse, Sergio Nava comments, does not mean designing its aesthetics but, above all, building experiences that are able to give the user added value over reality.
The Institute then created a new master’s degree aimed at training a new job figure. The course combines the teachings of space design with those of learning and the use of new technologies. In particular, it teaches students to design the “new spaces” for brands.