Cultural resilience experiments

Cultural Resilience Experiments, as well as being the title of this article, is also the purpose of an elective course for Master’s students at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano, called Temporary Urban Solutions (TUS). During the scheduling of teaching activities for this course, we unexpectedly found ourselves in the midst of a real global emergency due to the explosion of a pandemic that generated a necessity to adapt, to redesign a teaching method investigating social and cultural issues in order to experiment new educational approaches in the field of Design for Social Innovation and prototype new temporary urban scenarios during periods of a pandemic. In the following paragraphs, attention will primarily be focused on the structure of a new teaching model for the TUS course: a didactic experimentation with cultural and social investigation, translated into analogical visions and digital practices, and conducted remotely through interpersonal connections. Anew methodological and design approach was tested within six weeks, which consisted in rearranging themes and practices already consolidated with the basis of Design for Social Innovation, through the use of new digital and analog tools for co-design activities and the generation of simulations for the prototyping of the final project. Design Education is always changing. Starting from the awareness that “the experimental approach will become the normal approach in our future» (Manzini, 2015), Cultural Resilience Experiments is the result of a new possible educational methodology that reflects on these changes and transforms them into possible new scenarios. Manzini (2015) urged us «to consider the whole society as a huge laboratory for sociotechnical experimentation”: this practice is an example that could be used as a model in the future on a large scale where future designers must be able to manage complex and innovative processes, possess transdisciplinary knowledge, and to combine them in their projects.