Industrial Design, Structural Engineering, Computer Science and Chemistry for the development of life-saving furniture systems in seismic areas

During an earthquake, mobile systems, furnishings and equipment, that set up the environments, can either become obstacles and barriers that aggravate the danger conditions - especially for the elderly, children and those who have difficulty walking - or, conversely, represent a possibility of salvation in case of collapse. The challenge for scientific, technological and industrial research is to innovate, under a structural perspective, the design of furniture and equipment that are used in the schools and offices and transform them in smart passive-safety systems that can contribute to the protection of life and - through the development and integration of sensors and a IT platform for management - to the localization and retrieval of people in the event of a crash during an earthquake, also improving its performance in terms of safety, environmental sustainability and healthiness. Through a multidisciplinary technical-scientific approach to the innovation and the sharing of different know-how within the public-private partnership involved in the project, the expected results not only concern the creation of new furniture systems for safer schools and offices and theirs validation through structural and general tests, but they also concern the potential that the project itself owns, which can contribute to generate, in terms of innovation, an economic development and growth of competitiveness of the Italian “Legno-Arredo” sector, one of the most important of “Made in Italy”, consisting mainly of Small and Medium Enterprises, who largely realise the products on national territory, working with traditional and mature technologies, and, in many cases, have been affected, especially in the South of Italy, by the economic and social crisis and by the globalization of markets.