IDEActivity Center is the Design and Creativity center of the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano, one of the largest design research and teaching facilities in the world. The Center collaborates with researchers and professionals with complementary skills, in synergy with a multidisciplinary network made up of international laboratories and research centers.

• The Center We are a center of excellence that combines research in design, studies on creativity and co-design dynamics to offer organizations tools and methods capable of fostering and activating the creative approach that facilitates innovation processes through design. In our work we are guided by the scientific study of creativity combined with the strategic mindset of design thinking. We build new strategic scenarios together by integrating Design Thinking and Creative Thinking. Our projects have people at the center, we generate new ideas with them and explore concepts capable of bringing value to the company, training, research and teaching.

In particular, there are 3 thematic areas on which our research and project work is focused:

• Digital Creativity for Digital Maturity We develop, implement and apply a human-centered design model with creativity-driven tools and methods that allow us to facilitate and strategically guide the ongoing digital evolution process by exploiting the potential of new technologies to reach Digital Maturity through the enhancement of people and creativity factors. We study how new emerging technologies influence creativity and vice versa how digital tools can facilitate and increase it. This allows us to anticipate future visions and generate scenarios above all related to digital changes, but also to social and economic sustainability.

• Design is what connect creativity and innovation. The design gives shape to ideas so they becames pratical and attractive proposals for users. New design methods must be based on human-product experiential aspects, including cognition and emotionality as well as physicality. Starting from these premises, it is possible to talk about an evolved concept of design that becomes strategic for companies, institutions and organizations, giving the opportunity to generate innovation, consolidating a human-centered approach to innovation that is unique to design. Design therefore assumes the connotation of a “planning mentality” as a strategic approach to solving concrete problems in which creativity plays a fundamental role.