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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
Partner & Co-Founder, UnderstandingLab
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this conversation as PDF file
1
GK VanPatter: Welcome, Claudio. 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
the mission of your Academy and Masters Program, 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 socio-cultural 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.
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 moulded 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 favouring
at the same time the collection of useful feedback by designers.
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 multi-dimensional
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 visions; 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; 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 of this key issue which we consider
to be near and dear to next design leadership.
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.
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, I want to try to unpack
that a little more. Let’s try it this way: Does Domus Academy have
a process logic that you teach there, 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 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 cross-disciplinary 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.”
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 do you teach cross-disciplinary team
dynamics 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 a designer should be able to manage situations in which “cross-disciplinary”
(not “mix-disciplinary”) 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.
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 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 a 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 co-evolutionary 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.
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-to-human 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.
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 rigour of design with the subversive attitude of creativity.
In 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 with the aim to create and inspire a new company’s
management executive, 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. 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.
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.
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