ViviCalusca a project, supported by Fondazione Cariplo, aimed to bring collaborative innovation into a social housing context in order to understand whether collaborative services can help citizens, with different difficulties, to take care of themselves and the space they live in. An intervention with the aim of leaving, once completed, services that the inhabitants themselves can then use.
The aim of the project was also to promote a form of hybridisation between a space such as the Cohub, a public space in the Milano municipality that is a bearer of innovative methodologies and projects, and a working-class apartment block that lives in a central area of the city but has all the forms of isolation typical of the suburbs.
ViviCalusca therefore wanted to experiment with new languages and methodologies, but also with new collaborative practices which, according to numerous studies, are mainly used by a young and well-educated public and have difficulty reaching the elderly and weaker social strata that could instead be the main beneficiaries of this type of service.

The project was organized into 3 main activities:

1. Ideas Stand: a set of activities to identifying possible areas of opportunities to activate collaborative services, social events or different sort of exchanges. This activity was called ‘Ideas Stand’ because was conceived as a stand where passers-by could stop and share their preferences among a set of ideas suggested. The stand was set up in the patio in front of the Cohub space, so as to be in a visible and transit area where to attract the inhabitants without excessive insistence or intrusiveness. The ‘Ideas Stand’ was repeated several times throughout the project,

2. Talent Board: a set of activities aimed at mapping resources and actors through a co-design tool to collect the ‘talents’ owned by the community, useful to shape a first prototype of a micro-economy of exchange. The activity consisted in the compilation of a card, the ‘Talent card’, on which each participant wrote his her own ‘talent’, understood as a competence that could be made available to others. The talents were intended as simple abilities such as cooking, sewing, teaching how to use a device and other sorts of domestic help. In the same way the ‘cards’ aimed at collecting what each one wanted to learn from the others.

3. Notice Board: while the Talent Board has been used in a metaphorical sense to stimulate the emergence of people's talents, in this last phase it became e a physical object to support and stimulate the interactions of the inhabitants. It was an actual Notice Board to be placed in the concierge of the complex of Vicolo Calusca, organized according to precise categories, decided on the basis of previous experiments and also thanks to the creative conversation between the various partners of ViviCalusca and the social operators.

The project concluded with the "official" delivery of the Notice Board to the community organized as a symbolic moment during the closing event ‘Viva Calusca!’ on December 12th, 2018.