A new approach to empower the basics of representation skills for product design students

We assume that representation techniques play a fundamental role in the Product Designer's activity because of the needs to describe in the most efficient way the different phases of an industrial design project: the creative one, the development step and the documentation step. We prefer to use the word “representation” rather than “drawing” because we believe that today the project representation is no more only drawing, but it’s still, also drawing. Because of this starting assumption, we are trying to improve the effectiveness of project representation courses by an innovation in the structure of the teaching activities in which we are involved at Politecnico di Milano Design School. The paper will describe at first the main topics treated and the standard organization used for several years, and later the goals, the contents and the results of a course, Drawing Studio, that has been deeply renewed from the A.Y. 2017/2018. The framework and the results highlighted in this paper are part of a still ongoing basic research project, funded by the Politecnico di Milano Design Department. The experimental course described in this work is a practical evolution of the activities described in a previous paper (F. Brevi, M. Celi and F. Gaetani, 2018). The main objectives of this course are to train a quite large group of freshmen students to the representation techniques for product design and, at the same time, to assist them in the change of their mental approach to studying, from high school to university. The organization of this course has been setup on a mix of different skills and tools, based either on lectures and on practical exercises, along three paths: an analog one focused on descriptive geometry and on hand sketching, a digital one focused on technical drawing and a third one based on the building of physical models by hands. The results of this experimentation appeared promising, but at the same time we faced also few problems that we will describe as well as the changes we will try to implement to fix them. The final goal is to define a precise and detailed syllabus to be submitted for adoption by all the people involved in teaching this course at Politecnico di Milano.