Teaching and empowering representation skills for product design students.

Representation techniques in the Product Designer's activity play a fundamental role to better describe the different phases of the project development: the "ideational" phase, the “intermediate” phase and the "technical - documental" one. Because of this role, at Politecnico di Milano Design School we are trying to improve the effectiveness of representation courses by innovation in teaching activities. The case study highlighted in this paper is part of an ongoing basic research project, funded by the Politecnico di Milano Design Department (“Dal Segno alla Forma/From Sign to the Shape” funded by FARB - University Fund for Basic Research), and it has been a practical evolution of the activities described in a previous paper. So, this paper aims to describe the goals, the contents and the results of a course, Methods and Instruments for Design, that has been completely renewed in the A.Y. 2017/2018. The main goal of this course is to train a quite large group of first year students to the representation techniques for product design in a strongly integrated way mixing digital and analog tools. The organization of this course has been setup in a transversal way, based either on lectures and on practical exercises, along two paths: an analog one focused on hand sketching & rendering for the more creative steps of the design process, and a digital one more focused on visual communication for the presentation of the project phases. For reaching this goal, the more theoretical parts have been integrated with hands-on sessions for the use of the Adobe suite software (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign). The results of the first try of this experimentation appeared extremely promising, so it has been decided to run it once again in 2019 to consolidate the method and to collect more exhaustive data. At the same time, some changes will be implemented to fix the few problems we have realized in this process. The final goal is to be able to define a precise and detailed syllabus that could be submitted for adoption by all the people involved in teaching this course at Politecnico di Milano.