The exploring designer: A design training model in Italy

Abstract

In Italy, university courses on Industrial Design were born to train skilled operators to critically assess projects and to pit against different scenarios, combining the technical and production dimension with the sociocultural one. The teaching is aimed at building relationships among function, suggestion, innovation, and adaptation to the context. Nowadays, the situation is different and notably two conditions have brought to a revision of training models and education to the project within the university purview. First, the awareness that Design is now an intersection, a sort of square where human and technical sciences meet and where the Designer is a go-between, whose task is to integrate different skills and knowledge. Second, the recognition that Design has evolved together with the traditional question “how to do it?”, since today the Designer is asked also “what to do?” or “where to do it?”. Therefore, from a problem solving actor to the exploring researcher, a designer must be able to find out new product types and sectors, new production ways and new consumer behaviours. Based on these challenging scenario for Design, this article aims to discuss the questions “how to do it?”, “what to do?” and “where to do it?”, which correspond to three training aims having an always increasing complexity in educating the designer to become: an aware designer, able to read the present (explorer 1); a scenario designer, able to foreshadow the future (explorer 2); and a surfing designer, able to go beyond the common sense (explorer 3).

Key words: design training, meta-design, exploring design.