Filippo Spiezia, co-founder of Digital Design Days & Award 2016 / OFFF Milano

It is almost like a dream. It was my desire to have an unprecedented event in Italy. I want to bring together the most innovative and disrupting protagonists of Digital Design from the whole world and put them on the same stage with the most excellent national experts. All to favor a confrontation, a dialogue between different cultures, inspire one another, share experiences and foster new collaborations.

Digital Design Days & Award is a larger event that includes OFFF Italia (Milano), workshops, digital installations and many networking opportunities. OFFF is the backbone of this first edition, but next year it will be on its own and may set a precedent for other Italian cities.

I took part in about 10 editions of OFFF Barcelona, and several others of OFFF on Tour. I am deeply in love with this event, its format, the atmosphere that pervades OFFF. My strong desire was to bring it to Italy and share this event with my design community.

Since 2012 there is no longer an official and qualified award in the Italian digital scene, not to mention the web. We created this award to stimulate, promote and reward the creative excellencies of Italy in digital design.

First of all I invited all the artists and professionals I adore (from a professional point of view), and those who are best at delivering their talks, make it alluring from every point of view. The event grew day after day, with the enthusiastic support of the most influential leaders in the world and from the most successful Italian companies alike.

Actually, no. For this first edition I left full freedom in the choice of the subjects. I only indicated the main theme: design in the digital world, whatever this may be: web, sound, motion, installations, game, app, or anything else.

After my experience in Portland at Second Story, I have learned the importance of technology as a support to the user for the involvement in any interaction and experience with a brand or a product. Therefore I decided to involve many digital artists and ask them to bring some of the most beautiful and fascinating projects for the public. Some are shown for the very first time, like the SU installation by Bertrand Carrara and Yi-Wen Lin, an evolution of star canvas. The Interactive Wave by Sorob Louie, Senso and me, is a video installation that we will make interactive with live tweeting. Lastly, the innovative interactive dance performance Complessità by Enrica Beccalli and Roula Gholmieh has its European debut after the Tribeca film festival.

I am more excited as designer than as creative director of the event. We will welcome so many leaders in the digital design field that are very well respected in Milano. Some will come to Italy for the first time. I can’t wait to listen to their talks and share this with the Italian community.

It will be fun, inspirational and there will be very much to learn from all these excellent speakers that will come. A unique and unmissable experience, with an unprecedented lineup that were never brought together in a single event before. In the beginning we thought to start with a Zero edition but then, with my partners, we decided that the first edition should mark our will to make this event the “can’t miss” of the year and a not only for Italy benchmark in the digital scenario.

The pixel is the main element that creates the interaction between user and display, whatever it is. The communication is founded on this element and its development took many creative directions: the event brand, or the promotional video, the website or the DDDot trophy of the Digital Design Award.

No real reason. We really liked this combination of colours, and together with Graffiti, that supported us in the branding and social media, we chose to apply it in all the possible versions and for all the elements of our communication.

Well, beer, but also very good wine. Let’s not forget we are in Italy! We want to make sure that there are good opportunities for networking between participants and participants and speakers and we try to create as many occasions as possible for new collaborations to sparkle.

27—29 October 2016
Milan, Italy
ddd.it

28—29 October 2016
Milan, Italy
offfitalia.com

Hello Monday, Accurat, Alex Jenkins, Riccardo Giraldi, Jakob Kahlen, Unit9, Saizen Media, Mucho, Ars Thanea, Mediamonks, David McCandless, IDEO, The Mill, Claudio Guglieri, Alex Brunori, Hector Ayuso, Anton & Irene, Vasava, Dogstudio, Carla Cascales, Sehsucht.