The University, long understood to be a place of research and training, has been handed the task of producing cultural, scientific and technological innovation and of being – all the while – a fountain of knowledge and testimony of memory.
Today, however, the University is being asked to be present and active in the realm of civil society and real economy, externalising its skills and taking
on - when faced with the extreme reduction in State funding for research, training or cultural activities - the process of fundraising that inevitably
imply the concept of “good cause” and the engaging levers of relations and communication.
The only strategy that seems feasible in the medium term is to follow the public-private model of financial support for training, research, and the production of culture.
Therefore, university and industry come together to plan and sustain the training and pre-competitive innovation processes. The territory in which the
University is set, with its specificity and physical surrounds, and the intangible and delocalised territories of the cognitive processes in the world of research, in which it performs its activity, are two opposite but interacting poles of the innovation process in the era of the economy of knowledge.
There is also an awareness that the university training and research activities can no longer be singularly connected to a localised vision but must relate to a broader geography: regional, national, global.
The XfafX project is present within this critical framework of the university governance, characterised by the scarcity, or in cases the actual absence, of
public resources, calling solely on its cultural contents, its potential for event attraction, the innovation of meaningful content by the leading figures in
design discourse, on visibility and development of inter-sector relations for which – Institutions, Associations, Foundations, Production companies etc.
- they have deemed to support it economically as a result of an illuminated vision of social responsibility towards the production of culture and the world
of training and university research.

Alfonso Acocella

PROMOTERS
Università degli Studi di Ferrara
Facoltà di Architettura di Ferrara

GENERAL SUPPORTERS XFAFX
AHEC American Hardwood Export Council
Casalgrande Padana
Il Casone
Lithos Design
Pibamarmi
Giuseppe Rivadossi
Viabizzuno

XFAFX SINGLE EVENTS SUPPORTER

promo_legno

slamjam

Institutionals channels
www.xfafx.it
www.unife.it/facolta/architettura
www.materialdesign.it

Contacts
ufficiostampafaf@unife.it