Francesco Rodighiero, president of the Design for All Italia association

The election and the remit

In May 2021 the association held elections for the board of Design for All Italia. The president’s institutional role is mainly to promote the values and principles of Design for All.

The board

The board elected in 2021 was made up of:

• Francesco Rodighiero (President)
• Giuseppe Mincolelli (opens in a new tab) (Vice President)
• Pete Kercher (Communication)
• Claudia Comella (opens in a new tab) (Treasurer)
• Giulio Ceppi (opens in a new tab) (Secretary, with responsibility for Teaching)

According to the association’s official page (opens in a new tab), consulted on 29 October 2026, the current board is made up of Francesco Rodighiero (President), Giuseppe Mincolelli (Vice President), Michele Marchi (Secretary), Claudia Comella (Treasurer), Pete Kercher, Erica Isa Mosca and Alessia Planeta (Board Members); Giuseppe Di Bucchianico is Past President.

The 2021 objectives

In 2021 the board set out to continue the work of the previous president, Giuseppe Di Bucchianico (opens in a new tab), consolidating the association’s base and building effective communication for a broad and varied audience. The first commitment announced was a wide-ranging discussion with all stakeholders on the effectiveness of the accessibility law, Legge 13/1989 (opens in a new tab): to understand its strengths and limitations after more than thirty years of application, and to produce documents that could inform a less prescriptive, more guidance-based standard, in line with the approach taken in Europe and the Nordic countries. The site discusses this in a dedicated article: The removal of architectural barriers: Legge 13 and the results achieved since its adoption.

The programme also aimed to develop services and training: the association wanted to become a solid point of reference on the subject for courses, universities, institutes and public authorities, while remaining open to consultancy for companies on Co-Design processes, identifying stakeholders’ needs in order to define design requirements.

What has been done

Among the case studies published by the association, the one on the Bologna Civic Museums (Musei Civici di Bologna) (opens in a new tab) documents work carried out by Design for All Italia with the Department of Architecture of the University of Ferrara across 12 museum sites: 3 training and initial listening sessions, more than 80 anonymous questionnaires, more than 10 Co-Design workshops with more than 150 participants, more than 400 needs collected and organised into 6 thematic and operational areas, and more than 15 main documents and technical annexes. The outcomes are the design guidelines and the plans drawn up in accordance with the Ministry’s directives for cultural venues.

The case study on BTicino Linea 5000 (opens in a new tab), by contrast, documents the co-creation process at the scale of a mass-produced industrial product, which received the iF Design Award 2025. The projects developed by the studio with the association are collected on the portfolio page Design for All Italia.

On 17 October 2026, in Florence, the association organised the study day Design for All Process: strategie per l’inclusione (strategies for inclusion). The programme also included the public presentation of work on a Design for All certification tool, ahead of an amendment to the association’s statute announced for December 2026.

For projects and consultancy using the Design for All and Inclusive Design approaches, the consultancy page describes how we work.