Research through education: training yacht designer by a cross curricular learning-by-doing strategy

This paper presents an innovative educational project which improves traditional yacht design programs by mixing up the design, prototyping and construction phases. The foundations of this educational project have been laid down during several years of management of the master in Yacht Design at the Politecnico di Milano. This new didactic model is characterized by high interdisciplinarity and strong interaction among the stages of ideation and development. Furthermore, it aims to train professionals to meet strict deadlines and to respect the natural work flow of a project. The model has been tested in 2016 in the LDYD Learning- by-doing Yacht Design Workshop. The workshop involved professors, researchers and students of different departments: Design, Aerospace, Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering. The participants shared their knowledge by designing and building a 4,60m high-performance sailing-boat to take part in a competition within Italian Universities, called 1001velaCup. It consists of two different challenges, a regatta and a towing tank test, to evaluate the performance of the different boats. The workshop provided the tools to manage the design and construction processes of boats – general plans, ergonomics of navigation, aero-hydrodynamics of hulls and sails, and deck equipment – within the strict deadline of the regatta. Alongside a training result, the workshop stimulated the research activity and favoured the consolidation of the partnership within the university and the industry. The new didactic model, enriched by the academic results obtained from the LDYD workshop, will be implemented next year into interdepartmental courses.