Digital Atlas of Tactics to Designing Sustainable Factories

For a long time, the design of factories has been profit-driven only, while their detrimental effects on the environment, perceptual-aesthetic interferences with the surroundings, and social disturbances on local communities have been largely neglected. Despite a growing attention towards these topics, literature shows that there is a fundamental knowledge and tool gap on design practices for holistically sustainable factories, and companies are often unaware of both negative and positive effects related to the impact of their sites on the landscape. This paper presents a toolkit that has been developed to support entrepreneurs and designers in devising more sustainable factories through an integrated perspective, which is the great novelty of the approach. The article focuses on one of its tools: a digital atlas of design tactics. These have been mapped in sustainable factories around the world and labelled with an ad hoc faceted classification. Each tactic is then described in an info-sheet, which feeds a web portal. There, the user is assisted in searching for the most suitable tactics and mutual links with other useful strategies. The main potentiality of the atlas is to encourage a holistic design approach by highlighting positive synergies among tactics from different fields