Our Research Center

Since 1991, sAu is a community of people active in the most diverse contexts of the world of research (scientia) and business, associations, the world of work, institutions (usus), which deals with analysis, documentation, design and training in the field of Generative Communication strategies and systems. The aim of the research that sAu conducts is to intervene concretely in Intervention Areas and Fields of Action that are particularly strategic and have a strong socio-economic and cultural impact.
The perspective that guides all the activities of sAu Research Center is that object oriented, that is aimed to realize concretely Projects.
Our Intervention Areas
and Fields of Action
sAu Research Center works on Intervention Areas that range from agriculture to rural development, from health to healthcare, from sustainability to Cultural Heritage. Each Intervention Area is organized by Fields of Action, in which the sAu Research Center carries out Generative Communication Projects with a strong political and social impact.
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Each Project has its Officina

Each Project is realized through a system which stimulates cooperation among different stakeholders in all the design phases: from the conception, the development, to the management and the monitoring (sAu Officine) of the obtained results until their communication (sAu Quaderni, the journal of sAu Research Center).

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Our Design and Communication System

sAu Research Center has created a specific system that supports and guides researchers, experts and workers of all levels in their activity. sAu Ecosystem of Tool is a suite of tools, closely connected and interactive, that are intended to carry out research, design, development, documentation, monitoring, communication and training activities.

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Our Values, our History

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 History, our Partners. Since 1991
Great projects need good travel companions.
The story below is dedicated to all those who have accompanied us so far.

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

Knowledge and practices to build shared knowledge

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.

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.

Health and Healthcare

Toward a new communication pact between medical and healthcare personnel, researchers, institutions, associations and citizens

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.

Technologies to Enhance
the Human Touch

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.

The main active Research Areas
Intervention Field | Health, Well-being and Healthcare
The Active Role of the Patient for a Healthy Society
We believe that the many, possible forms of participation in health choices, in the ways of offering and using social and health services can not be sporadic events, but it must become daily acts of citizenship.

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

The value of the perceived to measure and communicate the involvement of citizens and the operation of health services
Measuring the citizens’ involvement in healthcare cannot ignore the analysis of their perception of the actual functioning of the listening, communication and information processes implemented by the health system. But also, and above all, from the analysis of the point of view of all the professionals who, from inside the system, work to welcome, involve and accompany citizens in the care pathways.

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

Telemedicine and new technologies in healthcare
What are the contents, the policies at the basis of new technologies that are spreading pervasively in health systems throughout Italy, also thanks to the impulse caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? Such a strategic process for the future of territorial medicine cannot be left to the private initiative and the logic of profit, but it must be inspired by principles of openness, universality, accessibility. Starting from the issues of the digital divide and fragility, sAu Research Center works on the project of a telemedicine open to everybody.
The Projects realized since 1991

in the Health, Well-being and Healthcare Intervention Field

Health, Well-being and Healthcare
Sport that Generates Health. A New Information Tool for Citizenship
The Added Value of Involving Patients to Strengthen Access to Health Services
Master in Medical Scientific and Health Services Communication. Third Edition - 2022
Who is Afraid of Childbirth. Analyzing the Social Dimension of Motherhood
Intervention Field | Technologies to Enhance the Human Touch
The Enhancement of Human Critical and Creative Intelligence
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.

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

Knowledge is a common good! Rethinking the documentation as a tool for building project communities

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

New technologies for new lonelinesses
In the context of sociology of sexuality, for years the researchers of the Research Center have been analyzing the development and the monitoring the spread of new digital technologies applied to sexual adjuvants and in general to the context of pornography (up to the new frontiers of augmented-porn- on-demand), and their impact on the affectivity and sexuality of users. The idea is that new technologies applied to digital eroticism – rather than promoting a strengthening of human touch and physical experience – are confirming the tendency towards isolation and the progressive shift of human activities in the virtual world, in the name of a digital touch more alienated from the environmental and bodily reality and, therefore, from the social experience.
Intervention Field | Agriculture and Rural Development
For a New Idea of Value
The concept of value, and its practical application in all socio-economic, cultural and political sectors, must be radically redefined. It is no longer sustainable, from any point of view, that it should be made to coincide – as is the case today in most cases – with a definition based on purely economic and financial parameters.

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

The relationship between material and immaterial value Symbolic and imaginary as generative resources of value
To define the real value of agriculture, it is necessary to overcome a purely economic paradigm, measuring and enhancing the impacts that agricultural production has on a social, environmental, cultural and health of the community and the territory level. It is a priority to identify which intangible aspects are decisive in defining the value of a product for the realization of a generative communication strategy.

Our Research Projects

Agriculture and Rural Development
Agriculture and Rural Development
New EVO. The value of olive growing for the sustainable development of territories

Health and Healthcare

Health and Healthcare

Sport that Generates Health. A New Information Tool for Citizenship
Who is Afraid of Childbirth. Analyzing the Social Dimension of Motherhood
Technologies to Enhance the Human Touch
Technologies to Enhance the Human Touch
School and digital culture: let's start from don Milani!
The Generative Communication Paradigm since 1991
The Generative Communication Paradigm, conceived by prof. Luca Toschi, by its inclusive and participatory nature, considers communication as common-action: a tool to develop community building strategies involving different actors from a given geographical area (citizens, associations,
companies, institutions, research institutions, etc.). We strongly believe that to communicate a service or a product,
it is necessary to create communities of interest, objectives, and values that cooperate for the development of the product/service itself.
A strictly promotional communication model cannot be effective. Innovation processes are based on a communication generating knowledge on the territory and having a transdisciplinary approach aimed at implementing a shared project.

Our Design and Communication System

In order to develop communication projects that respond to the strategy and method of Generative Communication, sAu Research Center has created a specific system of tools that supports and guides researchers, experts and workers of all levels in their activity.
An innovative system in constant development.

Our Design and Communication System is a suite composed of:

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 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 communication tool of sAu Research Center and a newspaper regularly registered at the Court of Florence. It is the place where many voices – different in terms of knowledge, skills, abilities, professionalism, social roles, but united by precise ethical choices – share and discuss a new culture of communication.

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 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 communication tool of sAu Research Center and a newspaper regularly registered at the Court of Florence. It is the place where many voices – different in terms of knowledge, skills, abilities, professionalism, social roles, but united by precise ethical choices – share and discuss a new culture of communication.

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.

About Us
Many disciplines, knowledge, experiences, competences converge in the projects of sAu Research Center: for this reason the activities involve researchers, but also professionals, of different origins and very articulated scientific-professional backgrounds.
This allows sAu Research Center to offer its partners tools for analysis, design, development and communication monitoring capable of responding – immediately – to the most specific and diversified needs.
Luca-Toschi

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

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 profilo
Marta-guarducci profilo

Marta Guarducci

Member of scientia Atque usus Research Center

Research assistant at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.
Eugenio-Pandolfini
Eugenio Pandolfini

Co-founding member and Association Treasurer of scientia Atque usus Research Center

Ph.D.

Researcher at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.

Ilaria-papini
Ilaria Papini

Member of scientia Atque usus Research Center

Research assistant at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.

Marco-Sbardella
Marco Sbardella

Co-founding member of scientia Atque usus Research Center

Ph.D.

Research fellow at Center for Generative Communication of University of Florence.

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