Three specific Trainingpackages have been developed by the partnership, treating some important items for Design in the furniture sector, especially in view of their use inside Small and Medium Enterprises:

Design for All

Design for All is design for human diversity, social inclusion and equality. This holistic and innovative approach constitutes a creative and ethical challenge for all planners, designers, entrepreneurs, administrators and political leaders (EIDD Stockholm Declaration© 2004).

Design for All aims to enable all people to have equal opportunities to participate in every aspect of society. To achieve this, the built environment, everyday objects, services, culture and information – in short, everything that is designed and made by people to be used by people – must be accessible, convenient for everyone in society to use and responsive to evolving human diversity (cf. Aragall etc. 2003).

The practice of Design for All makes conscious use of the analysis of human needs and aspirations and requires the involvement of end users at every stage in the design process

The concepts of comfort and safety are integrated with accessibility and usability topics bearing in mind that to reach a better design quality the final users with all their different needs must be the centre of the project.

Design for All (in short DfA) means to design and plan in an inclusive and multi-sensorial way ensuring comfort and enjoyment to the final users.

Read the entire document in .PDF → TP1 Design for All

All the training entries → Design for All 

Service Design

Service Design is a new emerging area that connects both, business and design development. Service Design is a tool for designing a customer orientated service experience. The major innovation is the use of participatory design approach that includes the customers in the design process.

This training package includes practical examples from different service design projects. The TP 2 focuses on creating an understanding of a service design process and the basic understanding of the generative methods used in service design process.

Read the entire document in .PDF → TP2 Service Design

All the training entries → Service Design

Image, Branding and Heritage of Furniture

Enterprises should learn to concentrate on Imaging for the own enterprise and products fostering on Cultural Heritage of Furniture in strong connection to some important innovative items:

  • innovative materials and processes
  • environment, health, safety and well-being
  • new marketing strategies
  • New Design and Design for all

Often Enterprises do not know to have strong heritage-traditional items. On the base of this important starting point, innovation, sustainability and use of new materials/processes/approaches can be used in order to create a new image of the enterprise/products, and/or a special brand might be developed on the background of the specific cultural heritage of the local European Furniture Sector. New technologies and new approaches are a strong opportunity to reinvent products and to characterize the company brand, through an intelligent integration between innovation and heritage.

Read the entire document in .PDF → TP3 Image, Branding and Heritage of Furniture

All the training entries → Image, Branding and Heritage of Furniture