NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN
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Envisioning Design: Understanding Domus Academy
Claudio Moderini Master in I-Design Director Domus Academy
GK VanPatter Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute Co-Founder, Humantific Making Sense of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation
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Understanding Domus Academy
1 GK VanPatter: Welcome, Claudio. I am so glad you are able to join us. Our mission in this Issue of NextD Journal is to reach out to a number of design education thought leaders and you were high on our list. To begin, tell us something about what the mission of your Academy and Masters Program is, Claudio. If Domus Academy and your design program are meant to be solutions to particular challenges, help us understand what those issues are perceived to be. What is the vision there? Claudio Moderini: A first aspect of our mission is to create and stimulate design visions applying a humanistic approach towards the evolution of technology and business. In this perspective, DESIGN means “to create what does not exists by way of a design strategy” and VISION means “to see (and show) the invisible”; both aspects highlighting the role of design in the complexity of the advanced market crossing educational, research and corporate needs and values. This definition shows how our teaching programs are aimed at providing students with the theoretical and practical skills to carry out an activity of “problem setting,” more than on problem solving, using their imagination to envision scenarios and strategies based on the introduction of information and communication technologies in the everyday life environments. For the educational perspective, Design Vision means to refine the practical and conceptual skills for generating innovative concepts and strategies interpreting the Information and Communication Technologies potentialities, crossing creative design sensitivity to market-oriented technological and business competence. For the research domain, Design Vision means to develop new approaches and methodologies able to transform the design visions in design opportunities and to “give a meaning” to the technological innovation through the adoption of medium/long term perspectives in relation to the strategies and dynamics of the market. For the corporate and market perspective, Design Vision means to feed the strategic vision with a sociocultural perspective in terms of brand positioning and brand culture intended as direct expression of the product and service offered more than as mere communication tools. A second aspect is that the definition of the mission is for us a continuous and intriguing challenge, a work in progress that involves not only our faculty and students, but also our partners and supporting companies and all the people that share with us the ideal of innovating the traditional vertical approach to education, proposing a horizontal, more fluid, organic experience based on “learning by designing.” This approach, borrowed from the tradition of Italian design, sees the educational path as an integration and extension of the professional path. The institute and the educational activities are structured like a design studio, with workshops and laboratories where students and teaching staff, often external professionals, work together experimenting and acquiring new skills.
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This multi-layered approach follows the idea to provide an educational infrastructure that is able to address simultaneously different perspectives and needs, often in contradiction each other, taking into account the role that an educational institute has in helping students to find their own way in the creative industry constellation, so as its role in feeding the cultural debate and in experimenting and creating the conceptual and practical tools to be used by companies for developing their own visions.
2 GK VanPatter: Can you talk a little more about the relationship between “problem setting,” and the focus of your program? Are you talking about problem finding within the context of interaction design or are you referring to something broader? From the Domus Academy perspective, what does “problem setting” mean? Claudio Moderini: More than a design rationale, problem setting is a positive attitude that sees the designers, independently from their disciplinary background, as cultural agents, as people that with their ability to transform simple ideas into design visions aim to contribute to the envisioning of the changing world, usually led by technological and economical factors not necessarily aligned with human needs, desires and expectations. Problem setting means to shift the focus from supporting human needs, which remains important, to supporting human desires. Problem setting doesn’t mean to be able to predict how the future will be, as many futurologist do, but to describe how we would like it to be, what the strategies for implementing our vision are and, last but not least, to be able to individuate the potential implications of the proposed solutions. More in specific, the problem setting approach is supported and developed within the I-design Master curriculum through the usage of a palette of design techniques ranging from what we call inspirational benchmarking to ethnographic observation, to metaphorical thinking, role-playing, activity mapping, etc. The palette of technique is an evolving tool that each student has at his disposal and that helps designers to individuate potential research directions for their projects. Among these techniques, for example, the “concept scenario model” is a diagrammatic representation of an interactive system that includes not only the technical description of the solutions in place, but also shows the physical context of use, the roles of the users/actors, the contents that circulate within the system, as well as the functionalities of the system. Another technique is the so called “opportunity map” that in the concept generation phase, where a number of alternative proposals are developed, helps to organize them within a framework molded on the design vision and supports the process of focalization highlighting the difference and commonalities between concepts. Both of these tools have the role of facilitating the dialogue between the different competencies involved in a design process including users: they help users to envisage the potential of innovative solutions favoring at the same time the collection of useful feedback by designers.
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3 GK VanPatter: In the graduate design education community today, we see many educators suggesting that specialization is the way to go. Your comments regarding designers as “cultural agents independent from their disciplinary background” seem to suggest a different point of view. Help us understand how the issue of specialization or the disciplinization of design is viewed from the Domus Academy perspective. Claudio Moderini: If we look to the nature of our approach, we could say that its origin is probably “genetic.” Domus Academy is, in fact, strongly linked to the Italian design culture that is, by tradition, horizontal and open to cross-disciplinary contamination. If we look to how this approach is contributing to the positioning of our institute in the continuously evolving educational arena, we have to consider other factors. First of all, Domus Academy is a post-graduate institute, which means that it should be able to offer an experience that integrates and enriches the graduate path of studies. A second aspect is related to the international nature of the Academy, which means that our approach necessarily has to be able to open a dialogue with a variety of points of view and to mediate a range of different backgrounds and disciplines. Domus Academy is a melting pot where people from different countries and cultures share an immersive one-year experience based on cultural pollination and exchange. When students come here, some of them are very specialized, others have a more humanistic and horizontal background — all of them reflect a particular perspective based on the mixing of cultural/geographical provenance and personal experience. In this context, we try to support students to position themselves into the design chain, strengthening their talent, elaborating a personal perspective, and assuming a multidimensional point of view based on the understanding of the complexity of design activity nowadays. Returning to the role of design and designers, the ability of crossing disciplines and of managing multiple points of view is moreover important if we consider the interactive design domain. Due to its implicit complexity, the design of interactive media and systems is by default a cross-disciplinary, team-based activity in which every team member should be able to perform a specific role, to develop a strong sensibility towards the understanding of the process, to collaborate with others, to integrate and hack resources coming from different domains, and to facilitate knowledge transfer. Being a designer today requires a multi-dimensional personality able to match creative/design skills with the ability to manage a complex research process, through different perspectives related to market/technology strategy and vision. It requires a combination of managerial and creative skills resulting from the crossing of the competencies typical of a project manager — as in business — and of a project leader — as intended in the design disciplines and in architecture — or a creative director — as intended in advertising and media publishing companies. Often we use the language of creative fields such as movie-making or music for describing the role of the designer. A designer, like a movie director, a choreographer or, using a contemporary metaphor and quoting one of the Academy co-founder Andreas Branzi, like a deejay, should be able to combine and manage elements coming from different perspectives; Page 4 of 14
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he should be able to manage the complexity, to take advantage from the experience of others, to manipulate the ambiguity. A designer should definitely be the opposite of being specialized in a single discipline.
4 GK VanPatter: WOW! I am taken aback as we see so many design educators convinced of specialization today. It is exciting to find such a different point of view. Before I ask you about the HOW and the WHAT of Domus Academy, help us understand a little more about your program in general. What is the average age range of your grad students, and how many years of professional experience would they typically have? Claudio Moderini: The average age range of our students is oscillating between 24 and 28. These numbers reflect the actual trend that sees an increasing number of people applying immediately after the end of the graduate studies, while the number of people that see in the post-graduate studies the opportunity to refresh and/or redirect the working career remains stable. In the last years, we have also observed a renovated interest by companies that are looking to educational formats for their employees; that’s the reason why we are also experimenting with hybrid programs that cross these emergent corporate needs and post-graduate education. In terms of formal requirements for admission, candidates should have an internationally recognized graduate degree or, alternatively for applicants over 25, a documented working path in the field they are applying for. In terms of disciplinary background, we are open to any provenance. If we consider the master class in Interactive Design, due to its focus, it is open to candidates with a background and/or professional experience in fields such as architecture, communication science, computer science, economics, engineering, fashion design, industrial design and management; but we also consider applications from people with different backgrounds on the basis of a personal CV, a letter of motivation and, when applicable, a portfolio. Apart from the bureaucratic aspects, what we are really looking for are strongly motivated people that demonstrate their willingness in discovering and training their own talent, developing their personal perspective, so that having entered or re-entered the job market with a clear competitive advantage, they can contribute with their everyday practice to the development of the design culture itself. Moreover, looking not only at the scale of the single student but considering a larger perspective, the overall educational strategy of Domus Academy is based on the creation and maintenance of a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural environment, which means continuously monitoring and reacting to the geo-political transformations, looking for contacts and partnerships with developing countries such as in recent times with India and China, on the global level, and with the East European countries, on a local level.
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5 GK VanPatter: I would like to return now to something that you said earlier regarding Domus Academy being more focused on “problem setting than on problem solving.” Since both of these terms seem to mean different things to different people, lets try to unpack that a little more. Does Domus Academy have a process logic that you teach, and does that logic differ from one program to another? In other words, is there a common language or process logic at Domus? Claudio Moderini: Even if we don’t like to define our approach as a methodology in strict sense, and consequently we don’t provide students with pre-defined process guidelines or methods, we can recognize some strong commonality between all programs that can be referred to as a sort of empirical knowledge or implicit logic. 1. Learning by designing: Every master class is considered a small/medium size design studio that, along the course of the year, performs a number of design activities, mainly in the form of design workshops (from 5 to 7) led by a representative of Domus Academy faculty and some external professionals. The brief of the workshops is based on research issues defined by the Academy in collaboration with industrial partners and the external professionals (project leaders). In synthesis: designing means full immersion in team-based activities and continuous exposure to innovative research topics. 2. Vision-based approach: The design process starts with the elaboration of design concepts, not with an analysis, in order to create the reference framework. From then on, the process follows a so-called “reverse design” process. Alternating divergence and convergence phases, the concepts are confronted with – and validated through – the concurrent activities, such as activity analysis, user understanding, technology road mapping, business strategy, etc. Designing means: first think, and then act. 3. Simulate to stimulate: Designers develop and visualize scenarios of use, re-conceive the brief of the project, and specify the qualities and the attributes of the service allowing a constant flow of innovation into the design process, going beyond the mere interpretation of user needs, to stimulate the demand of new functionalities that will transform the way in which the users see and understand their environment. 4. Evolving methodology: The fourth and most important aspect is related to the fact that the definition and choice of a methodology is part of the design process, as are the continuous re-elaboration and invention of design techniques that can offer new answers to emergent questions. Designing means: adapt your own method and strategy according to design objectives. Then, apart from these basic elements representing the common ground, every program has its own more or less declared set of techniques and process logic. In the Interactive Design master, for example, we propose an approach that has been developed in collaboration with partners like DeepBlue, an Italian company specializing in activity
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analysis and complex systems, and the University of Siena, specializing in human factors and user involvement. This approach considers the design process as a sequence of iterative cycles based on parallel tasks (design-driven tasks: concept, interaction and interface design; user-driven tasks: activity analysis and user understanding; technology-driven tasks: prototyping and implementation; communication-driven tasks: exploitation and dissemination). Each cycle represents a specific design focus with its correspondent set of potential design techniques to be used in order to orient the design process: INSPIRATION : to get insights from the application domain and gather knowledge from cultural resources ELABORATION : to develop high-level concepts from different disciplinary perspectives SHARING : to present, confront and test concepts elaborated separately by the design team members PRODUCTION : to evolve single concepts in integrated “concept scenarios” producing mock-ups and working prototypes.
6 GK VanPatter: OK, terrific. I see some good apples and oranges that we can work with here in your empirical knowledge/implicit logic landscape. It would be great if we could do some unpacking around a few of the points that you mentioned, as I can see several connecting to emerging issues in design/innovation leadership today. Your first point about “learning by designing” seems to be a statement regarding the underlying Domus Academy pedagogical model — how students learn, rather than what they learn. We find that most graduate schools of design subscribe, in one way or another, to this model today. Some schools make reference to it as “learning by doing”. I am sure we could likely talk about this orthodoxy from several different directions, where it came from, etc., but instead I want to get off that well-worn path and take us into some more interesting terrain. Since NextD is focused on cross-disciplinary innovation dynamics, we look very closely at the “learning by doing” model as it is practiced in design education today to determine what is and what is not actually going on there. We seek to look beyond the “veil” of terminology and inside the actual mechanics of how the model is being used. Even though this model has existed for decades, we find there to be huge assumptions being made around the model still today. For example, in many “learn by designing” design programs we still see crossdisciplinary team skills being “taught” simply by placing students from various countries and disciplines in an environment and giving out a team design assignment. In this version of the model, sophisticated best practice knowledge regarding cross-disciplinary dynamics are most often completely missing while students are encouraged to “work it out” for themselves as part of the “design learning experience.” Page 7 of 14
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In this free-for-all version of the “learning by designing” model, students learn design best practices by designing while being exposed to worst practices when it comes to team dynamics. Since many design educators learned design and presumably team dynamics the same way, they often have no idea that there are key dimensions missing. The mistaken assumption seems to be that the concept of students learning design by designing and that of students learning team dynamics by designing are interchangeable or one and the same, when in reality they are two different things. For many design graduate students, this is how they experience teamwork in design schools still today. With that experience and with that knowledge, they go out into a now very sophisticated marketplace. We are interested in bringing this issue into the light as the above described assumptions are no longer acceptable at the leading edge of the marketplace, yet we find them still to be embedded in design education. Having said all of that, I would be very interested to hear your perspective as a design education leader on why graduate design education in general seems to be so far behind on this issue. Beyond that, I will really put you on the spot here and ask if anything different is occurring around this issue at Domus Academy? How is cross-disciplinary team dynamics taught there? Claudio Moderini: You touched the point. In fact, there is a strong difference between working in a group (doing) and developing teamwork skills (learning), and often the simple idea of sharing an objective is intended as a result for both. This brings us back to the “learning by doing/designing” issue and gives me the opportunity to re-focus briefly my personal opinion on the topic: “Learning by doing,” following its origin, is associated with a trial and error progression where the main objective is to perform a task or to design a solution (WHAT) intended as an answer to a particular set of problems. In this context the emphasis is on “doing” in achieving a result, while “learning” has a secondary role, contextual to the specific design objectives. In synthesis: “you learn what you experienced” and “the learning outcomes can be difficultly generalized and/or applied to future experiences.” The usage of the same statement in the educational domain adds a second dimension (HOW) that naturally shifts the weight from “doing” to “learning,” focusing on the activity of deducing from the direct experience some models and/or methods. Substituting the word “doing” with “designing” means adding a third dimension (WHY) that links every single design experience to a cultural context, using design culture and knowledge as a framework and problem setting as a tool. I think that apart from the level of originality, the combination of these three dimensions constitutes a good basis for the development of a cross-disciplinary approach that reflects, “in nuce,” the traditional triad based on technology, human sciences, and design driven approaches, each of them with its own perspective, often in open contrast to each other. If we consider with a positive attitude these observations, we could say that ideally Page 8 of 14
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a designer should be able to manage situations in which “cross-disciplinary” (not “mixdisciplinary”) means to consider and respect not only the ideal aspects of the different disciplines but also their idiosyncrasies. In this sense, if we take the example of complex international research projects involving partners from industry, education, etc., often the success of the project itself is based on the ability to consider, and manage, not only what happens WITHIN a cross-disciplinary team that shares the same objectives but also, and especially, what happens BETWEEN different teams with apparently similar but implicitly different objectives (business, research, culture, etc.); a situation in which the common ground is not defined by the objectives — highly polycentric — but by the process, based on parallel, and sometimes divergent, tasks. Following these considerations, the focus of our activity in terms of supporting the development of basic team dynamic skills is based on the ability of managing the design process and of playing/performing a specific role within the process itself, looking to complexity as an advantage and not as a constraint. In particular, the development of team dynamic skills is based on design seminar activities, the “learning by designing” approach, and two main principles: Immersion: Every design seminar is a simulation of a professional design process based on negotiation and meaning-building that starts with team building, project planning, and briefing, and proceeds with the alternation of divergence and convergence phases where students are required to develop a large number of design concepts. In order to simulate a “real” process, every student has to individuate and play a specific role within the team that differs in relation to the process — the way in which the design process is structured and managed — and to the complexity scale — design objectives, number of people involved, time constrains, technology roadmap etc. — and that is independent from individual competence and background. Integration: In order to guarantee within the simulation the cross-disciplinary complexity of a “real” design process and to proceed through different selection and refining phases, external experts from different disciplines are involved in the design seminars. Students, in fact, have different cultural backgrounds but have quite similar design approaches and basic expertise (product, visual and interaction design, architecture). The “missing competencies are added by building an extended team including tutors and external experts. Combined they encompass design, strategic and technical roles. The combination of immersion and integration and the fact that team dynamics are not “taught” as a separate subject but integrated into the everyday educational practice, as other fundamental aspects of a contemporary complexity-driven design approach (socio-economic forecasting, entrepreneurship, activity analysis, etc.), is our contribution to the debate. Obviously, we are also eager to learn more and to investigate/experiment with new perspectives.
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7 GK VanPatter: OK, help me synthesize what you just said. Are you saying that at Domus Academy graduate students do a variety of cross-disciplinary design projects and, upon completion, the teaching staff assume they have learned team dynamics? Is the idea that they learn it through immersion in the content of the project and through the interaction that they have with faculty and students working on the project? Also, it would be helpful if you could explain what the difference is in your mind between cross-disciplinary and “mix-disciplinary.” Claudio Moderini: Probably I should have introduced the topic from the beginning, specifying that Domus Academy offers masters programs dedicated to students that have completed their graduate education mostly in industrial design, visual design, and architecture; that means that they should have developed the basic and fundamental skills for a designer including, among the others, team dynamics. This doesn’t mean that we underestimate the topic, assuming that students develop their team dynamic skills by empathy; what I am saying is that we have to contextualize the issue within our educational framework, whose main objective is to bridge individual skills with research and corporate culture through a design activity based on design seminars and workshops, obviously integrated by theoretical and practical lectures. The scope of immersion is to re-create the complexity of a design environment by simulating the elements and roles that are needed for the completion of the assigned task and by offering students the possibility to interact with an extended team that includes corporate representatives, external professionals, and experts from the different disciplines. Within this rich environment, students EXPERIENCE the essence of team dynamics, then with the help of staff and faculty they have the opportunity to re-elaborate and integrate the experience by way of lectures, discussions, and de-briefing meetings. Simplifying, we could say that the core aspect of the approach is: first make a design experience under the guidance of an expert, then elaborate and transform the experience into a design practice. Obviously this process is never-ending and is also applicable outside the educational context to everyday working practice every time that you have to face a totally new project or design domain. Referring to the second point: the term cross-disciplinary is commonly used for defining ONE design team compounded of members with a different disciplinary background. Members share an objective and are strongly committed by the fact that often they are co-workers of a certain company. In the everyday practice, or at least in my experience in research projects, what happens is that more often a design environment is made of MANY design teams, each of them compounded of members with “slightly” different disciplinary backgrounds. Teams are often built around a specific competency and a single company. A team of designers includes, for instance, product, interaction, and/or visual design skills, rarely other disciplines. Teams share a process and a general objective but have strong internal commitments and objectives that sometimes are intrinsically divergent. What I wanted to highlight is that the two situations represent totally different levels Page 10 of 14
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of complexity within the same definition of cross-disciplinary, and that probably being based the first on convergence and the second on divergence, we should find a new definition for one of them.
8 GK VanPatter: Let’s come back to this if we have time. Since we are particularly focused on exploring issues related to how the design leadership revolution is changing what designers need to know at Domus Academy, I want to return to your empirical knowledge/implicit logic landscape and ask you about #2 Vision-based approach and # 4 Evolving methodology. Knowing what we know about changing expectations in the marketplace, we see deep understanding of innovation process as key to enabling Next Design leaders to engage in a wide variety of challenges in an increasingly complex world. I am therefore puzzled by a couple of things that you said about how the process begins and where the process comes from at Domus Academy. You seem to suggest that projects begin with visioning, rather than a discovery or fact-finding analysis phase. Am I missing something there? How does one envision a solution to a fuzzy situation not yet understood? In your remarks about Evolving methodology, you seem to be suggesting that students make up their own process for each project. Did I miss something there? Does this mean that there is no foundational process logic taught at Domus Academy? Claudio Moderini: I can try to give an answer to both questions (envisioning and evolving methodology) by explaining more in detail the nature of the approach we propose within the I-design master. A design process can be described as a coevolutionary activity in which user studies and analysis of the context, concept generation/development, and technology development are carried out in parallel and then integrated in the form of integrated concept scenarios to feed user-centered design sessions. During the different steps of the design process, even if activities are carried out in PARALLEL, we can individuate a LEADING FACTOR that guides the process itself that changes in the different phases of the process moving from concept generation to user understanding and involvement, to technical implementation. At the beginning of the process the leading factor is constituted by the design vision, intended as a way to link the design objectives to the socio-cultural framework, performing activities of inspirational benchmarking looking at different fields, focusing on ethical/aesthetic aspects and implications for the project, envisioning scenarios that can stimulate the dialogue with potential users and stakeholders and orient the design process. In the following phase, when the knowledge about users/stakeholders grows and when, through simulations and mock-ups, the project starts taking shape, the leading factor becomes the ability to manage and interpret user contribution for generating requirements and activity specifications. Finally, as soon as the project becomes step-by-step more concrete through implementation of demonstrators/prototypes, the leading factor passes in the hand of technology. Page 11 of 14
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In synthesis, the core of the approach is that a multi-disciplinary team first produces high-level concepts from the point of view of the single disciplines, taking the opportunity to explore diverse point of views, and then integrates them in concept scenarios through a collaborative activity of meaning negotiation, sharing of values and orientation of design objectives. The process logic is based, as said before, on the alternation of divergent (inspiration and elaboration) and convergent (sharing and production) phases. The evolutionary dimension of this process logic is based on our educational style that is collaborative more than directive, and on the consideration that a student has an active role from the beginning, not only in performing the required tasks but also in contributing to the evolution of the educational framework and techniques. The first consideration is related to the way in which students enter in contact with the approach. We experimented that the best way to teach methodological aspects is to let them emerge during the design process; in this case, the role of teaching staff and experts is to trigger and to elicit such aspects and to stimulate students in their elaboration during project debriefing phases. The result is that probably people will use different terminology to describe the same discovery, but the most important aspect is that students find out and elaborate their own view on the approach, more than just learning it from books or through lectures. The second aspect is that students are continuously supported in re-elaborating not only the results (what and why) but also the process (how) and that part of the success of an educational activity is connected to the ability to renovate and integrate its tools and methods with the contribution of all people involved, teaching staff, students, experts, professionals, commitment, stakeholders, etc.
9 GK VanPatter: How does the Master I-Design program at Domus Academy differ from other interaction schools? Does your definition of interaction design include human-tohuman and or human-to-information interaction? Claudio Moderini: The distinctive characteristics of Domus Academy with respect to the interaction issue can be synthesized in the slogan that we created in 1995 for the launch of our first Interaction Design Course that was making a still actual promise to design “The New Territory of Human Relation for a New Lighter Material Culture�. According to that early vision, designing the interaction means to create scenarios and strategies based on the introduction of enabling technologies within the everyday environment, intended as a TERRITORY inhabited by people, objects, tools and information; a relational space based on HUMAN interactions; a threshold space in between physical and virtual, in which every aspect is related to a LIGHT phenomenological and perceptual dimension and in which every solution contributes to the enrichment of the MATERIAL CULTURE. To make it simple, this vision gives a holistic interpretation of Interaction design, whose aim is to design the relations between all the actors involved, independently from their being people, artifacts or information. Page 12 of 14
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10 GK VanPatter: I noted references to “enterprise culture” on your web site. Is the approach or process that students learn at Domus Academy something that is specific to interaction design or can it be used for other purposes? If one of your graduates finds himself/herself in a large multi-disciplinary enterprise with many kinds of fuzzy organizational challenges, can this process be transported into that kind of setting and applied to enterprise/organizational challenges? Claudio Moderini: The approach I presented reflects essentially what we do in the Interactive Design Department, but at the same time it is based on some basic assumptions that are shared within Domus Academy that represent our fundamentals. Among these one of the most relevant is that being a designer in the advanced market means for us to consider both strategic and operational implications. This means being able to creatively manage the contamination between business, technology and design. In the recent years we have investigated both in education and research issues ranging from design direction, to strategic design, to entrepreneurship and creative business, all of them testimonials of the emergent role of a designer/entrepreneur able to merge research and professional skills, and to balance the rigor of design with the subversive attitude of creativity. This autumn, Domus Academy will launch a new specific program in Business Design that will give us the opportunity to further develop and systematize this area of investigation. The aim is to create and inspire a new company’s management executives, made of people able to combine creativity with entrepreneurship spirit. In this sense design/entrepreneurship is considered as an attitude, an approach, and a research direction that moves from the crossing of different cultural perspectives from creativity to business, from design to strategy – that could open new intriguing possibilities for the creative industry domain and for design-driven organizations.
11 GK VanPatter: I wish we had more time to talk about this new program. It seems like we are just getting warmed up here Claudio. Hopefully we can continue this conversation off-line. In closing let me ask you one last difficult question. From your perspective as an Italian design education leader, what is the single most pressing issue facing graduate design education today? Claudio Moderini: The most pressing issue is, in my opinion, the need to evolve the educational system in accordance and in synchronous with the socio-economical transformations that are often difficult to predict and sometimes even difficult to understand. This difficult task can be accomplished only promoting a strong synergy between educational, research and corporate activities. The relation between corporate, education and research can be described as a virtuous cycle based on design in which corporate represents the strategic dimension, research the innovation potentialities in products and services and education represents the creative and experimental attitude, able to feed the relation with innovative ideas and to develop up-to-date competences. Page 13 of 14
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The challenge for the future is to develop flexible and advanced education solutions that will be able to satisfy the multi-dimensional and continuously changing target, from students looking to an immersion in design practice, to companies looking for inspirations, to technology researchers interested in experimenting and exploiting their findings, to organizations looking for talents etc.
NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN
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