
Our Research Center
Each Project has its Officina
Our Design and Communication System
The Values that Inspire sAu Research Center
sAu Research Center sees in the complexity of society an immense wealth of resources and recognizes in the fragmentation of knowledge and skills that characterize this particular historical moment the main obstacle to scientific, civic and social progress.




































Our Intervention Areas
Agriculture and Rural Development
A New Idea and a New Practise of Value
The concept of value, and its practical application in all socio-economic, cultural and political sectors, must be radically redefined, moving away from a definition based on purely economic and financial parameters.
Our Projects are based on an idea of Agriculture and Rural Development aimed to redefine the concept of value in agriculture, strengthening, in a systemic key, the sharing of knowledge and the cooperation between all the realities that operate on the territory and that usually do not communicate with each other.
Culture and Society
We believe in a society in which everyone can exercise the right to live his/her daily lives – at work, in family, in community – in order to know, enrich and improve his/her own life.
Coming soon
Research and Third Sector
For a New Culture of Research
We believe that it is more urgent than ever to defend the autonomy of the world of research, and its authority and credibility, redefining the relationship on the one hand with the values that inspire it and on the other with the complex world of daily living acts of citizens.
Coming soon
Health and Healthcare
We believe that the many, possible forms of participation in health choices and the ways of using social and health services should become acts of active and conscious citizenship.
sAu Research Center has been working for years in the field of health and healthcare with the aim to initiate knowledge-generating processes in which health companies, hospitals, associations and institutions cooperate to increase the level of health literacy of citizens.
Daily sustainability
and Climate Change
A Common Action to Bring Out Unexpressed Resources
What we are experiencing is not a crisis due to a lack of resources, but it is due to the inability to recognize and value the infinite resources that we can find with our creativity and intelligence.
Coming soon
The Enhancement of Human Creativity
Technologies (old and new ones), every form of automation, mechanical and otherwise, must be rethought and redesigned to respond, first of all, to the inalienable values of our humanity.
We believe in an idea of technology that is in support of human freedom and the right of individuals to know and guide their behavior according to the values in which they recognize themselves. It is a technology based on critical intelligence and human creativity: on human touch.
Research Area
The Right to Know for a participation in prevention, health choices and in the improvement of health services
There is no a clash or a ‘passing of the baton’ between handwriting and typewriting in the development of a written text. On the contrary, handwriting and writing on the keyboard assume different roles and functions, but they are always complementary to each other. From the visualization on a sheet of paper of our thoughts, of our ideas, with its limits that force a synthesis, to the power of digital for the processing, the deepening and the development of the text, this relationship, after years from its debut, is more and more open.
Research Area
Research Area
Crisis VS Opportunity. The emergency as a tool for redefining the health system
The emergency room represents a strategic area to be analyzed in order to intervene on strengthening the health system. It is, in fact, the gateway to health services which – if the reasons that lead people to use the emergency service are properly analyzed – can reveal critical issues and opportunities for improving the ordinary system.
Research Area
in the Health, Well-being and Healthcare Intervention Field
The project aims to study the communication model adopted by the institutions - at international, national and regional level - to promote physical activity as primary health prevention. The ultimate goal is to use the Generative Communication Paradigm to create an awareness and communication campaign through the creation of an app in which the health needs of users converge with scientific information from industry experts.
For years, the Research Center has been involved in implementing communication strategies to strengthen the level of patient involvement in the field of healthcare and health. The project aims to identify partners to initiate shared analysis and evaluation processes of listening and communication actions - that are active in the partners’ organizations - with the aim of strengthening these services.
The CMSSS Master - in collaboration with the Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine and Careggi University Hospital (Florence, Italy) - is intended as a consultative training course. Thanks to the board of professors - researchers, doctors and experts of international level - the Master trains communication professionals who already operate - or would like to operate - in organizations that are interested in carrying out Generative Communication projects.
The project - carried out in collaboration with Professor Felice Petraglia, director of the Department of Gynecology of the Careggi University Hospital - aims to bring out the social dimension of motherhood through listening, identification, collection and analysis of the fears that characterize the imagination of pregnant women.
Research Area
Does handwriting still make sense?
There is no a clash or a ‘passing of the baton’ between handwriting and typewriting in the development of a written text. On the contrary, handwriting and writing on the keyboard assume different roles and functions, but they are always complementary to each other. From the visualization on a sheet of paper of our thoughts, of our ideas, with its limits that force a synthesis, to the power of digital for the processing, the deepening and the development of the text, this relationship, after years from its debut, is more and more open.
Research Area
sAu Research Center is working on the design and the development of integrated solutions – digital and analogue – functional to catalog, index, archive and document resources of historical Archives of associations, foundations, research institutions and current Archives of public and private professional realities.
The Research Area aims to create solutions that, overcoming the logic of a mere repository, propose a digital environment in which public and private organizations can draw on the documentation present in the various archives in their possession and, above all, re-propose its more useful and functional elements of knowledge for the realization of new projects that update them, and therefore enhance them, facilitating the creation of “project communities” starting from an idea of knowledge as a common good.
Research Area
Research Area
From consumption to use From a communication of a product to a communication in the product
The use value of products and services is often higher than their market price, and this is very true in a sector such as the primary one, where connections with areas such as health, sustainability, identity and culture are very closed. To move from consumption to the use of food, land and resources, it is necessary to activate relationships between all stakeholders – usual and unusual, including citizens who can and must free themselves from the role of passive consumer – so that they are aware of real value and participate together in sustainable development projects of the territories that finally stop consuming resources to switch to their use, conscious and sustainable.
Research Area
Our Research Projects
The project aims to redefine the value of oil and olive growing in Italy, helping to implement policies to support and develop the sector capable of making it a central element in the sustainable development trajectories of our country.
The project aims also to create a community of stakeholders - public entities, institutions, citizens, producers, restaurateurs, etc. - who daily work to enhance and communicate oil and olive growing as a heritage capable of generating value for the territories.
Health and Healthcare
Health and Healthcare
The project aims to study the communication model adopted by the institutions - at international, national and regional level - to promote physical activity as primary health prevention. The ultimate goal is to use the Generative Communication Paradigm to create an awareness and communication campaign through the creation of an app in which the health needs of users converge with scientific information from industry experts.
The project - carried out in collaboration with Professor Felice Petraglia, director of the Department of Gynecology of the Careggi University Hospital - aims to bring out the social dimension of motherhood through listening, identification, collection and analysis of the fears that characterize the imagination of pregnant women.
On the occasion of the events organized for the centenary of the birth of the prior of Barbiana (2023), sAu Research Center offers schools the opportunity to design and develop educational and communicative objects, that actualize the themes dear to don Milani.
Our Design and Communication System

It is a place where sAu community carries out design, development, management and monitoring activities for projects based on the method of Generative Communication. It strengthens collaboration and cooperation between all stakeholders involved.

It collects and makes available the knowledge that feeds the projects carried out by sAu community: contacts, relationships, reports, qualitative and quantitative analysis, but also the best innovative practices of Generative Communication.
It systematizes the collected data to enhance them as elements of knowledge functional to their reuse in different contexts.



It is the international series (publisher Leo. S. Olschki) of transdisciplinary studies aimed to redefine the relationships between the culture of complexity and sustainability, according to a communication paradigm that is projectually “generative” and a new cooperation between those who work in the world of research and those who work in daily life.

It is a place where sAu community carries out design, development, management and monitoring activities for projects based on the method of Generative Communication. It strengthens collaboration and cooperation between all stakeholders involved.



It is the training center of sAu Research Center that proposes object-oriented activities. It responds to specific needs that emerge within the projects carried out by sAu community: from the training reserved to the personnel of organizations, institutions, foundations, associations, companies etc., to initiatives addressed to stakeholders to give them a role in the project activities.

It is the international series (publisher Leo. S. Olschki) of transdisciplinary studies aimed to redefine the relationships between the culture of complexity and sustainability, according to a communication paradigm that is projectually “generative” and a new cooperation between those who work in the world of research and those who work in daily life.

Luca Toschi
Founder and President of scientia Atque usus Research Center
Director of Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence and of Lab Center for Generative Communication of PIN – University Center (Prato).
Full Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes, University of Florence.

Viola Davini
Co-founding member and Association Secretary of scientia Atque usus Research Center
Ph.D.
Research fellow at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.


Marta Guarducci
Member of scientia Atque usus Research Center

Co-founding member and Association Treasurer of scientia Atque usus Research Center
Ph.D.
Researcher at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.

Member of scientia Atque usus Research Center
Research assistant at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.

Co-founding member of scientia Atque usus Research Center
Ph.D.
Research fellow at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.
Contact us!
Write to viola.davini@sau-centroricerche.org