DESIGN IN SEASIDE CONTEXTS: PRACTICES, MODELS AND EXPERIENCES OF WELLBEING, SOCIALITY AND SUSTAINABILITY.

This paper proposes the synthesis of an academic research which, starting from 2016, examines projects, products, services and researches considering seaside environments as strategic places to examine in an innovative way how models of social well-being converge and change in relation of tacit, declared and emerging needs. The contribution intends to describe the role of design which, as a project science that integrates skills capable of generating and supporting development actions, offers concrete and unprecedented models of relationships, health, well-being, care of the body and of the person when referred to the specific place. These actions are in some way to transform themselves into enabling and multiplying factors of social, community and intercultural connections. On the beach, therefore, the complexity of contemporary living is fully reflected: from the evolution of customs and habits to technological innovation; from economic to social changes; from ideological to cultural transitions. In addition to this, the beach context is notoriously characterized by the combination of natural elements, artefacts and rituals bound to the limits imposed by landscape protections in relation to the benefits of local communities, the beneficiaries of the sea coasts and the economic chains operating in the tourist-seaside sector. And it is precisely in this complex framework that those "devices" endowed with principles of coexistence between territory and people take shape, also in an attempt to balance the degree of anthropization of nature with bathing solutions which are able to consider new priorities and sensitivities. The beach environment also represents the close relationship between typology-service-user and how these changes over time. In this direction, the beach becomes a metaphor for the inhabited space in which man regularly brings together needs and interests. Which is why, beyond leisure, well-being, relaxation, contact with nature, the beach reconstructs a multifaceted seasonally inhabited microcosm which draws from the city the idea of an expanded square in which public-private needs converge which welcome and place for interpersonal, and in which relationships are tested in a dimension of sustainable opening. Among the design topics for the beach, it is possible to cite the continuous search for "models of harmony" between exposure of the body, social acceptance and natural elements; ecosystems sustainability; the appropriate use of inaccessible areas or "submerged beach" strips; spatial and urban regeneration; the relationship of the seaside system with territorial specificities, communities and local heritages; the entry of increasingly digital technologies; the updating and implementation of models of sharing and sociality between natural needs and personal needs; inclusiveness, interculturality and demographic changes; personal well-being and care also as access to the democracy of services; the new global health challenges. The selection of examples that will be described on an international scale will therefore have the task of representing how the beach habitat is a significant place to show the possible coexistence between anthropic activities and ecological emergencies such as to provide a map of good practices exemplifying a progressive culture which has as its objective a concrete regeneration of the seaside environment.