Space Architecture Education in Milan

This paper suggest a method to develop project education activity teaching architecture and industrial design practices. The thesis is based on the application of a methodology called “project research”, developed by the author inside the Design Faculty of the Politecnico di Milano, to formative context of the fourth year of the Laboratory of Industrial Design “Space Design”. The methodology related to the project research consists of the elaboration of new knowledge through the project experience in which theory and practice overlapped and in which the external environment, the real purchaser, the industrial reality, are the principal interlocutors of the designer. The application of the project research methods to the formative context is recommended if the objective of the Laboratory of Industrial Design “Space Design” is oriented to a professional formation which put the students in the conditions to operate in a real context with external stimuli to the academic environment. The focal point of the thesis expressed in this paper is the proposal of a education program in which the theoretical lectures of the academic instructors interweave with external resources, as experiences of professionals from the scientific and industrial world, with the aim to stimulate students curiosity and get them accustomed to the complexity. It could be useful to place the theoretical teaching next to the real practice of the “workshop” through: the research, that is the capability to found information; the analysis, that is the capability to manage and organize them; finally, the elaboration of concept design, which represent the visualization of the first hypothesis in which the project requirements and the designer intuition join together. The results attended with this method could consent to the students to acquire a double management capability: the information management, from which it could derive the student attitude to the industrial design research, and the project management, from which could arise the attitude to the practice of industrial design. The paper describes the proposed method through the case study of the fourth year of the Laboratory of Industrial Design “Space Design”, in which the author is scientific coordinator, started from this year at the Design Faculty of the Politecnico di Milano.