Collaborative Practices Through Design and Engineering: The Phases of a Pilot Project to Improve the Human Condition of Vulnerable Communities

This paper presents a pilot project, developed under a research Ph.D. framework, showing that the multiplicity of actors from different branches allow the construction of innovative and framed projects. This dynamic and open process result in knowledge, skills and competences construction among themselves and, above all, their applicability in the context of social intervention. This reality emerges the need for integrated multidisciplinary social agents that are an added value for society, analyzing the capacity of cooperation between two different but complementary scientific areas of projectual nature, although with different methods and the practices, Design, and Engineering. The developed prototypes were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively allowing the researchers to perceive some restrictions when assembling the different materials tested, for a solution more focused on the usability/mobility bearing in mind issues such as budgetary matters and product symbolic character, its main characteristic, related to the thermal efficacy.