Learning objectives
The project on community catering aims to study a classic theme of the modern design project: how, starting from an idea for a solution, a company can draw up a coherent offer for a system-product (product+service+report+site, etc.) characterised by a brand and a series of qualities linked to the experience of the end user (experience design). To do this, we have to master a set of techniques (observation of contexts of use, analysis of places and services¿) to try to make in-depth analyses. This will enable us to understand better the system surrounding the catering sector, from the transport of goods from the factory to the site and the moment of use, up to the packing, sales and service outlets and display systems. It will also be important to understand what is less visible for the end user - what lies behind the scenes and comprises the logistic and information background that makes possible the meeting between the producers of products and services linked to catering (and to agrifood sector in general) and those who use what is produced. The project we are preparing to offer will therefore attempt to operate on all the elements (products, services, sites and communications) that comprise the interface between what the companies offer and their customers. From this point of view the course will attempt also to understand how this offer of products and services needs to be redesigned to take account of the great transformations now under way: social change, new forms of culture, lifestyles, globalisation of production and distribution and new forms of localisation, the spread of information and communication technologies and their impact. Considering this frame of references, it seems clear how and to what extent community catering activities may be taken as a litmus test of how the value creation processes put into operation by companies are changing: the capacity to build a strategic dimension into new product research and development processes becomes fundamental to be able to construct a dimension of competition. More specifically: if, on the one hand, it is quite obvious how changes taking place in society lead to changes in the logic of traditional activities such as catering-food distribution (in the area of sales systems, organisation of services, logistics, the role of packaging, etc.), on the other hand, it is also clear how and to what extent the interaction between society-catering-food distribution also operates in the opposite sense: that is, how and to what extent catering-distribution logics, as they are modified, lead to changes in the network of relationships and spatial organisation of modern towns and areas. And, in the end, of modern society as a whole.