Vianet is an Italian SME founded in 1993 and has worked on more than 500 projects across academia, industry and the public sphere, actively collaborating with government, public administrations and citizens. Clients include Sony, Nintendo, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Dior, Johnson & Johnson, and the Government of Singapore. Vianet uses strategic design as a means to define, drive, implement and support innovation processes and focuses on two main areas – design practice and research activities – through the following processes:
– Set up of iterative design loops in order to foster and drive both technology-push innovation and meaning-driven innovation
– Engagement of end-users and relevant stakeholders in the design process (co-design, participatory design, emergent design, design for use before use)
– Piloting infrastructures to test social, cultural, economic implications of innovation ideas put in contexts
– Design and implementation of services based on advanced technology: interactive experiences, information aesthetics visualizations, e-learning digital platforms, responsive architecture.
It is headquartered in Rome (Italy), with commercial hubs in Malmö (Sweden) and Boston. In the past five years, it has been working on experimenting with platforms to create mixed-media, multi-author, open-ended publications that leverage several technologies to re-conceptualize current narrative forms. Vianet has a long experience in EU-funding (H2020, FP7, Capacities, Environment, European Structural Funds, Media, Digicult, eContent).