The S.A.F.E. project: an interdisciplinary and intersectorial approach to innovation in Furniture Design

The S.A.F.E. project is an industrial research project whose objective was the design and prototyping of furniture for schools and offices capable of transforming themselves into intelligent systems of passive and "life-saving" protection of people during an earthquake, integrating technical-scientific knowledge and skills as those of Industrial Design, Structural Engineering, Computer Science and Chemistry and facilitating a process of cross-fertilization of the know-how of companies belonging to very different sectors, such as that of Wood- Furniture and that of ICT and IoT. During an earthquake, furniture and mobile equipment become obstacles that aggravate the dangerous conditions and often cause death, or, on the contrary, they behave, in a completely casual way, as a protection of life in the event of collapses. This different behavior of the furniture depends above all on how they are designed and built. The design of “anti-seismic” and intelligent furniture systems, developed for public contexts (schools and offices) in highly dangerous areas, could be an alternative and integrative solution, to the seismic adaptation of buildings, for the protection of people's lives during earthquakes. The challenge of the S.A.F.E. was to innovate the design of traditional furniture for schools and offices from a structural perspective, transforming them into intelligent systems for the protection of life, which facilitate detection, localization, and rescue of survivors under the rubble during an earthquake. The paper describes the main results of the S.A.F.E. project, focusing on the methodological relevance of a systemic, interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach to innovation to be able to manage both projects and complex research problems, and accelerate the processes of transfer and cross-fertilization of knowledge and know-how, in a collaborative model between universities and companies.