SMART Label 2025 - Host Innovation Award

SMART Label, Host Innovation Award, is an award for innovation in the hospitality industry, promoted by HOST - Fiera Milano in collaboration with POLI.design, which will be given during the next edition of HostMilano 2025 to those products / services / projects that stand out for distinctive features in terms of functionality, technology, environmental sustainability, or ethical or social implications.

A Jury, composed of professors of Politecnico di Milano and industry experts, will assess the applications and will give recognition to those that demonstrate that they have the necessary requirements of innovation

DOWNLOAD THE REGULATIONS

FILL OUT THE APPLICATION FORM

The jury

Matteo O. Ingaramo

Professore Associato al Politecnico di Milano, Scuola del Design

He graduated in 1997 in Architecture with a project of Industrial Design published as an excellent thesis by the Politecnico di Torino. Specializing Master Degree in Strategic Design at Politecnico di Milano. PhD in Industrial Design at Politecnico di Milano. Since 2005 he develops his research and teaching activities at the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano. He is Professor in Design. • Director of Master degree course in “Design for Product Engineering and Innovation”. • Director of Master degree course in “Premium design management”. • Director of Master degree course in “Design for Architecture” at Politecnico di Milano. He was a lecturer at the Politecnico di Torino from 2003. Founder of the course, he is Dean and professor for the Laurea Magistrale in Design&Engineering at School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. Co-ordinator of several research projects concerning design-driven innovation, for IDEA (InnovationDEsign Action) research group at Design Department. Since 2013 he is a member of Products, Services and Strategies research group. Some partners in consultancy: Haworth, Whirlpool, Cartier, Vacheron Constantin, Richemont Group, Indesit, SunStar, Ariete, Sacea, Carpisa, Bianchi Vending, Fastweb, RedBull, Constellation group, Replay, Unicredit, Tod’s- Hogan, Breil. He was Rector Delegate for International Relationships and former responsible for the Italian participation in the Sino-European Design Management Network. He is member of the Board of Directors of Fondazione Peano. He is Vice President of the GDIO Global Design Industry Organization. Head of Company Relations at School of Design. CEO and Chair from 2009, from 2023 is Past President in charge for Institutional Affairs at POLI.design, the post-graduate School in Design of Politecnico of Milano.

Venanzio Arquilla

Professore Associato al Politecnico di Milano, Scuola del Design

Designer, he is an Associate Professor in Design at the Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Product Design and the Master’s in Integrated Product Design at the School of Design. His research focuses on design innovation transfer, User Experience, and Service Design methodologies. He is the founder and coordinator of the XDA Experience Design Academy at POLI.design, which offers the User Experience Design course, alongside training, research, and coaching services for companies, public organizations, and institutions. As Scientific Director of the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano, he oversees the Joint Research Lab AXD (Automotive eXperience Design), a multidisciplinary research laboratory in collaboration with the Department of Management Engineering (led by Prof. Lucio Lamberti) and the Department of Mechanical Engineering (led by Prof. Giandomenico Caruso). The lab works in partnership with Huawei on the project “Intelligent Automotive HMI/UX Innovation Approach.” He is the co-director of the Master’s in UX Psychology, a joint program between the Politecnico di Milano and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, in collaboration with Prof. Andrea Gaggioli. He is a member of the faculty for several prestigious master's programs, including the Master in Strategic Design (MDS), the Master in Service Design (SDM), and the Master in Transportation and Automobile Design (TAD) at Politecnico di Milano _ POLI.design. He has been teaching at Politecnico di Milano since 2002. He is also the founder of Narvalo, air of change, a start-up spin-off of Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with BLS Group, focused on the development of respiratory protection systems for urban, sports, and medical applications, integrating Smart and IoT technologies.

Vu Duy Phong

Chief Design Director De` Longhi Group

Duy Phong Vu was born in Vietnam. In Germany, he trained in Hessen as an automobile model builder and finished at the top of his class. He majored in Industrial Design in Darmstadt, completing his studies with excellent results and a degree under the guidance of Braun’s Design Director Peter Schneider. Phong subsequently launched a successful career designing for brands such as P&G, Gillette, Oral-B, Pfaff Industrial, Brita, Wella Professional, DeLonghi, Kenwood and Braun. Phong can look back on 25 years of successfully applying his creative spirit to drive DeLonghi Group´s success story. Together with his design team, this is a story that he continues to write in his position as DeLonghi Group Chief Designer, which he holds since 2018. He is responsible for meeting the very diverse requirements of a wide variety of user groups, fulfilling their product application requests, satisfying user expectations and interpreting their individual sense of style into an inspirational brand language – a challenge that the 51-year-old, also part-time professor to Master Design students at Politecnico Milan and Shanghai’s Donghua University, embraces with enthusiasm. Phong and his team have already reaped more than one hundred international design awards: these include the prestigious Good Design Award, iF Design Award, Red Dot Award and the German Design Award, along with being selected as Design Team of the Year 2016 by Plus X. In 2018, Duy Phong Vu joined the panel of experts of the BraunPrize jury and in 2022 the prestige IF design award Jury. Since October 2018, as Chief Design Director, he has assumed overall strategic responsibility within the DeLonghi Group for the brands: DeLonghi, Kenwood and Braun Household.

Markus Orthey

Braun Design Director

Markus Orthey, Braun Design Director, studied product design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. A formative exchange year in 2000 at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, and an internship at Matsushita Electric Works in Osaka, Japan, broadened his international understanding of design. In 2001, he began his professional career at the legendary Braun Design Department, where he worked closely with designers from the Dieter Rams era. This period shaped his clear and functional design approach. From 2009, he was significantly responsible for the design of Braun shavers, clocks, and watches. In 2013, Markus Orthey joined De’Longhi Braun Household, the company responsible for developing and producing Braun kitchen appliances. Since 2019, he has led a five-member design team there, which has won more than 110 prestigious design awards under his leadership since 2012. He also collaborates and conducts projects with universities such as Politecnico di Milano in Italy and TU Delft in the Netherlands.

Giselle Chajin

Service Design Director at Tangity, part of NTT Data

Giselle is a Systems and Services Design expert with extensive experience in international consulting. In the last 12 years, she has lived and worked in five countries, learning from different cultures and backgrounds and working with the public and private sectors. These experiences helped her open up to new environments and increased her empathy for people and awareness of her surroundings—she is currently UX and Service Design Director at Tangity Italy.

New shapes
of hospitality Discover