NEB Prizes 2023: All Applications

Centralissimi is a service that links the public and private sector. It offers an entertainment and education format to involve teenagers in the policy-making cycle, helping them address their needs, concerns and proposals to institutions, through discussions with experts and the use of multimedia languages. Encouraging the learning by doing, it leverages the use of already existing local resources, such as bars and co-working areas in Centrale district, fostering the local sense of belonging.

CampUs is a participatory project that researches the methodology and the technical know-how to bring life to underused university areas, based on best practices from design thinking and digital fabrication. The project’s long-term objective is to educate interested participants around its basic components and thus invest in them to take on similar urban initiatives and address their community’s spatial needs both critically and creatively.

NET is a service that provides short workshops which help non tech-proficient people break the ice with technology in a practical way and in partnership with local activities. NET is deeply entwined with the local community and offers flexibility in building the learning path and the follow up activities. The service leverages gamification and group dynamics, considering technology as a medium to enable people in daily life and empower their creativity and not as the final goal.

The project is based on the idea to produce a palette of primary and secondary natural and organic color pigments for painting and series of several essential oils that would bind the pigment and help the pigment's paint last longer and smell good. The healing properties of both the natural/organic pigments and the essential oils are inevitable. The product can be used by students, artists, amateurs, people with congenital disabilities, art-therapists and art institutions.

The encounter between Art and Nature produces a fairy-tale dimension, Land Art installations to discover and protect biodiversity. Natural materials, together with the reuse of waste materials, are transformed into zoomorphic sculptures, with functional lodgings and shelters inside them, for specimens of local fauna and flora. A creative process carried out through a direct dialogue with nature, involving the local community through practical and educational workshops to help local ecosystems.

Purify both air and landfills with our eco-friendly corn-based air purifier - a revolutionary concept that transforms the industrial ecosystem by harnessing the full potential of biobased materials in mass production and accelerating the shift towards a greener industry. By turning waste into valuable resources, this concept, which incorporates advanced principles of circularity and cutting-edge production technology, lays the foundation for a sustainable evolution of the industry.

The project explores the possibilities of deculverting the Olona River along Milan, becoming the catalyzer of a green revolution for the open public spaces of the neighborhoods crossed, through the insertion of NBS, SUDS and placemaking strategies, assembling a sustainable and resilient green-blue urban corridor.
Like this, Milan becomes a green palimpsest, redeeming its ‘water spirit’ and achieving a holistic balance between the built fabric, its inhabitants and their natural capital.

The war in Ukraine has shown the importance of cultural heritage preservation and the need for a more cohesive EU. In an effort to strengthen our collective European identity, this project proposes to convert an abandoned correctional facility and its adjacent park into an archive of European cultural heritage. While the former prison will protect our digitised cultural heritage, the nearby park will provide space to perform and celebrate intangible cultural events.

Our story starts from a simple cherry flower which creates a connection between tradition and our daily living. Inspired by the simple flower petal we came to a distinctive bench design. Main initiative was to introduce the 3D-printing of concrete and innovative solution that would reflect the connection between the past and future. With this project we hope to awake wonderful memories of the older generation while initiating a desire to preserve and keep the tradition.

To be a host in a hosting country creates participatory practices to give asylum seekers the spatial agency to be host, as an empowerment tool while living in temporary structures far from home. The focus is on the creation of a policy to include, in the design process of these structures, the presence of collective spaces designed bottom-up through processes of tracing and drawing together with those living on the front line of precariousness.