Educational Innovation and Exploration of Museum Heritage: An Interdisciplinary Project to Engage Young Adults

In recent years, the crisis of established disciplines, often characterized by rigid "disciplinary boxes," has resulted in a series of innovative teaching experiments, aimed at challenging traditional approaches and boundaries while firmly maintaining the identification of the core of characterizing knowledge. Disciplines which were previously well-defined and separated are now viewed as interconnected and complementary, and students are more and more often encouraged to explore the opening of such "boxes", fostering the development of cross-curricular skills and a more comprehensive and multifaceted understanding of the project's complexity. Within this context, the paper aims at presenting an experimentation promoted at Politecnico di Milano, as part of the Open Atelier project (funded by the European Commission within the Creative Europe program, CREA-CULT-2021-COOP-2). By engaging a group of international students in an interdisciplinary workshop, this initiative enabled the development of innovative cross-sectorial projects ensuing from the co-creative application of design knowledge to the enhancement of the heritage conserved and promoted by four European House Museums.