Redesigning the participation of people in emergency response activities in Milan by helping them build confidence and skills through necessary training, eventually leading to shorter response times through self-reliance.
Working with
Red Cross Milan
INDUSTRY
Public Safety Services
TIMELINE
3 Months
TEAM
Overview
Mobia was developed in collaboration with the Croce Rossa Milano (Red Cross Milan) to reduce the response activation time of the emergency management system. The project began with a brief -
How can local emergency management become faster and more effective in an urban context like Milan?
An emergency reported in the city - Mobia
Rather than treating the brief as fixed, we reframed it together with the Red Cross. What initially appeared to be an organisational efficiency problem gradually revealed itself as a systemic gap between people, institutions, and time.
The Service
Mobia is a community-powered, decentralised emergency response system that reduces the time gap between an incident and the arrival of help. Developed in partnership with Red Cross Milan, Mobia trains and certifies students and healthcare professionals, assigning them clear roles and activating them based on proximity, credibility, and skills. When emergencies occur, nearby trained helpers can arrive within minutes to stabilise the situation until professionals take over. By transforming citizens into trusted extensions of the emergency system.
Mobia strengthens urban resilience through a systemic change without replacing existing services.
Mobia - Transform, Activate and Multiply
My Role
Understanding Emergencies in Milan
To ground the project in reality, we interviewed citizens who had experienced floods and blackouts in Milan, as these are among the most frequent large-scale emergencies in the city, apart from individual health incidents.
Our goal was to design for the system as a whole rather than a single user group. This meant observing how citizens, emergency responders, and institutions interact, and where those interactions break down.
Interviews with residents
We interviewed 8 people living in Milan who have been stuck due to floods and blackouts.
Discovery session
We did a discovery session with Francesco Burdo, the manager of the Emergency Management team at Red Cross Milan.
Desk Research
We reviewed research papers, case studies, and news articles, and mapped how emergency events cascade across actors from the first signal to on-ground response.
Key findings
Our research exposed a clear disconnect between citizen experience and institutional logic.
Citizens described emergencies as moments of confusion and helplessness as they often didn’t know how to act, who to contact, or how to help themselves and others. From an institutional perspective, emergencies followed formal activation protocols. While contacting authorities seemed straightforward, the reality involved fragmented communication, manual coordination, and resource sharing across entities, each step adding time before help reached the site.
Bureaucracy isn't agile
The emergency system in Milan is largely top-down, relying on central decisions and coordination. Informal communication and shared resources among different entities slows down the activation during critical moments.
Volunteering is demanding
Red Cross volunteers working in the emergency team often get burnt out and leave due to the demanding role that requires 24/7 availability. This leads to short retention cycles, weakening the Red Cross's long-term capacity.
People don't know how to act
Many citizens do not know how to act during emergencies, even when they are physically present. Lack of training and confidence turns potential helpers into passive bystanders.
From Insights to Opportunity
To translate insights into direction, we ran an ideation workshop.
Instead of addressing insights individually, we paired two insights at a time to identify opportunities, intentionally creating tension that pushed us to come up with interventions which were beyond obvious solutions already found in secondary research.
At this stage, our goal was quantity and diversity, not feasibility.
Ideas generated
The deliberate constraint
Although inter-authority coordination emerged as a major bottleneck, we consciously avoided designing for it. We lacked access to those most internal stakeholders, and given the project’s three-month timeframe, we chose to move forward rather than wait to get access to them.
We explored multiple prompting techniques, including AI-assisted brainstorming, using our research findings as inputs to surface overlooked opportunity areas and challenge our assumptions. As ideas accumulated, clear evaluation criteria emerged. We evaluated our ideas on the basis of:
Scalability
Long-term systemic impact
The ability to work with existing emergency structures
Ideas that solved problems for only one stakeholder were the first to be discarded.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Initial Concept - A Skills-Mapped Community Layer
Our initial idea was to onboard residents of Milan, document their skills, tools, and availability through a digital profile, and activate them during incidents.
By introducing this structured community layer, we aimed to complement official response, handle some tasks locally, and allow the Red Cross to focus on the most critical emergencies.The system also explored private partnerships for resources. At its core, the concept assumed that with the right structure and matching mechanism, certain emergency tasks could be safely delegated to trusted community members.
Creating a community layer
Co-Designing the Intervention
To validate our direction, we moved into co-design, starting with Red Cross operators.
Our goal was to test feasibility, trust, and delegation limits, and to understand real workflows under pressure. We chose to involve operators first because we wanted to design something that could realistically be adopted. Radical disruption felt likely to fail; incremental change required understanding the rules of the system.
First co-design session with Red Cross Emergency operators
What Didn’t Go as Planned
Despite designing game-like, speculative activities, operators repeatedly came back to operational constraints. Planned prompts were often bypassed as discussions focused on why delegation was impossible.
Takeaways
Going into the first session, we assumed some tasks could be delegated to the community. This assumption was quickly challenged and health emergencies were unanimously marked as non-delegable.
Only low-priority (green-coded) tasks, recovery-phase support, and psychological support were seen as possible areas for external help.
A profile card got pointed out as delegation was seen as a possibility, just because the profile was an ex-nurse. This highlighted how central professional credibility is in emergency response.
Second session
Learning from the first session, we made the scenarios more far-fetched, and made participants comment on different possible futures, which helped them come out of day-to-day troubles.
After the second session with Emergency Management leadership from the Central Operative Table (COC Milan), it became clear that delegation would always be extremely limited due to policy restrictions and liability.
Second session with Central Emergency Activation Leadership - COC Milan
Instead of asking what the Red Cross could give away, we began discussing how citizens could opt-in to support during incidents without compromising safety. And this direction was readily welcomed by the participants.
This triggered a key shift → from delegating tasks, to supporting official response.
Learning from people - Confidence as a missing link
We did multiple sessions with external participants focused on motivation and emotional barriers to helping.
People consistently expressed a desire to help without expecting anything in return, but described lack of confidence as the main blocker. Several shared stories of being unable to help loved ones during medical emergencies due to lack of training.
Online Co-Design session with potential helpers
Another crucial insight followed: Many students, especially medical and healthcare students undergo mandatory training as part of their education. This showed us where to embed Red Cross-certified training into existing life journeys, benefiting both citizens and the institution.
VISION
Evolved Concept
Introducing Mobia
Mobia is a community-empowered support system designed to strengthen emergency response in Milan without replacing existing authorities. Citizens receive role-specific training and become helpers, and are given supportive tasks based on their skills, proximity and performance, whenever Red Cross operators need help.
A helper being activated by a red cross operator
Main characteristics
Support, not delegation
Mobia does not transfer responsibility away from emergency authorities, keeping activations remain under authoritative control.
Training as the Backbone
Mobia is built on Red Cross–partnered training programs integrated into schools, universities, and professional pathways with provides legitimacy.
Defined Roles
To ensure clarity and safety, Mobia structures participation into three structured roles aligned with Red Cross protocols.
Opt-In Activation
Helpers are able to set availability to receive alerts based on proximity and competence.
Partnerships
Mobia partners with high schools, universities, and professional training bodies to embed emergency trainings into existing educational pathways.
Trust Through Recognition
A feedback loop that reinforces trust and long-term engagement through reviews and recognition.
The Action Ladder
The Action Ladder defines structured levels of participation within Mobia, ensuring clarity, safety, and accountability. It begins with Citizens, who are victims, and can also choose to train and enter the network. From there, helpers take on progressively specialized roles -
User profiles and Roles they would play in Mobia
This layered structure ensures that responsibility increases with training, certification and a person's background.
Training -> Action
Citizens receive Red Cross–partnered training through different educational institutions and become certified in clearly defined roles to join the network. When an emergency occurs, the operators activate nearby helpers based on skills and proximity to provide immediate support until official responders arrive. After each intervention they receive feedback and recognition to reinforce trust, confidence, and long-term engagement
Training modules and responsibilities
The System
Mobia is positioned within Milan’s emergency ecosystem in partnership with Red Cross. Educational institutions partner with Red Cross to train helpers, who get onboarded on the Mobia platform, and Red Cross operators interact with them through coordinated information and activation flows.
System Map (Phase 1)
User Journey
A detailed journey of how a trained helper (supporter) moves from onboarding to real incident support.
User Journey for Supporter
How everything works together - Service Blueprint
The service blueprint shows the operational layers behind the experience, mapping frontstage helper actions, backstage coordination amongst the emergency management stakeholders, platform processes, and especially the Red Cross oversight to ensure accountability and control.
Service Blueprint
Next Phase
Designed as a modular and partnership-driven model, Mobia can expand across all the emergency management entities in Milan by partnering with AREU Lombardia (112 operator), and assist all other entities as well in Milan's Emergency Management System. This model can also be utilized across different Red Cross teams in different cities across Italy and beyond.
System Map (Phase 2)
What I learnt
There's not always a need to create a new entity that would handle your initiative. Sometimes, just bringing the right stakeholders together through strategic partnerships could create innovative interventions that are a win-win for everyone.
FIN.
