How to Discover a Design Culture?

In this chapter, what characterizes a design culture is examined and a method is presented to discover new insights in the operations and procedures of disciplinary practices within the cultural domain of Italian Design. Examination of how students gained cultural insight in the seminar How to Discover the Italian Design will be two-fold, using concepts applied from the discourse on cultural studies, and utilizing a list of actors to guide the inquiry. The seminar was an opportunity for students from countries outside of Italy to discover facets of Italian Design. Students were introduced to the discourse in cultural studies and utilized multiple sources to examine five design disciplines: fashion, furniture, graphics, interior, and product design. Within each of the professional and disciplinary domains, students focused their research on designers, companies, product output, history and theory, and social media influencers, as well as the technologies, materials, tools, and methods used within the disciplinary domains. Relying on data visualization, students learned by seeing their research visualized into infographics, which helped them discover facets of Italian Design. Discovery is defined and presented as an important concept in the process of learning.