Tutoring future design students: a PO(S)T covid experience

With the COVID19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020, schools and universities had to reorganise their teaching delivery methods to respond rapidly to the changes brought about by the emergency. Immediately, social estrangement and the inability to continue activities in the usual way encouraged the use of online tools and solutions instead of traditional face-to-face classes: online platforms for lectures and collaborative sharing tools to support activities. The pandemic has forced a massive shift from learning and teaching in settings with physical interactions (UNESCO, 2021) to the online digital world. In addition to numerous contemporary and post-crisis reflections, the pandemic emergence also revealed the extent of technology’s influence on every sphere of our lives (Gere, 2009), changing the nature of our activities, their relevance, and our qualities as adopters (Steele, 2001). Subsequently, with the slow re-appropriation of some educational, design and collaborative spaces and moments, institutions could reorganise resources and rethink the ways and objectives of their educational offerings. In this context, the POTDESIGN Contatto/Condivido competition, as part of the national MIUR project Orientation and Tutoring Plans (POT) 2017-2018, challenged secondary schools, universities and tutors to develop a project to communicate their vision of the post-pandemic future. The aim was to stimulate students and tutors to design scenarios for using objects and services capable of re-appropriating spaces and rituals after the pandemic through new codes, systems, materials and interactions.