Scholarly papers as a teaching tool in Communication Design education

A scholarly paper is an academic work that is published in an academic journal to convey the results of research in a rigorous, clear, and reproducible way. The norms that govern its drafting have slowly converged to follow a precise structure to facilitate an organized narrative, a detailed description, highlighting the assumptions of the research, its hypothesis and methods, and the underlying purpose. It describes how the research was carried out, the main findings and discusses whether these results match the original assumptions, fit in the scientific consensus, and open new areas of inquiry. The advantages of such a format for the scientific community are well documented: it makes it easier for the reader to evaluate a well-organized and noise-free delivery of critical and important information. It allows the most relevant points to be delivered to the community in a concise and logical manner by summarizing the research process in an ideal order and without excessive details. On the other hand, the scientific writing process leads to several benefits also to the authors of the research itself. It encourages synthesis and clarity, ensures a rigorous compositional path, highlights original contributions and possible developments; it is also a valid tool for the valorization of personal reputation. In the educational context, it is common to use forms of academic writing (e.g., student-authored essays, term papers, abstracts, write-ups) as teaching tools to strengthen learning outcomes. However, in higher education, such forms are poorly suited to focus on original contributions and stimulate research activities: they function more as descriptive formats. In communication design laboratories, the teaching activity includes a research component in which students are asked for an innovative solution to a given brief. In this context, the paper can function not primarily as communication but as a reflection on the research activity. In particular, it encourages students to analyze the originality of their contributions critically, highlights innovation, identifies the limits of the interventions, and promotes students' awareness of the process. In addition, in terms of dissemination of results, the structure of the paper helps to formalize and disseminate the original findings. In this paper, we will share the experience of the final Design Studio of the Master of Science in Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano. The course aims to summarize the skills acquired during the entire study program, requiring students to develop original contributions concerning state of the art and propose innovative communicative solutions for a macro research question. Throughout the course, the teaching staff experimented with scientific writing to formalize students' contributions and increase their research consciousness. For this purpose, specific lessons have been organized to explain the structure of abstracts and papers (introduction, methods, results, discussions), followed by accurate reviews to analyze the progress step by step. This didactic process has led to the writing of papers that, although not yet academically rigorous, have certainly increased students' awareness of the level of innovation of their projects and has also laid the groundwork for the draft of the final thesis. Through a final anonymous survey, students reported that they found the scholarly paper useful, despite the additional challenges in terms of engagement.