Communication meets engineers: the Politecnico experience

Communication theory can have a strong impact in engineers’ activities and therefore deserve a place in technical university curricula. This is the lesson learned at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), on the Como campus, in which courses on communication are professed, with fruitful results. The paper will “tell the story” of how communication courses were introduced in the curricula of “Information Technology” and “Management” engineers, from the beginning in 1999 (when the elective course “Sociology of communication” was introduced) to the creation, in 2003, of a “Laurea Specialistica” (equivalent to a Master in Anglo-Saxon countries) in “Computer Engineering” with an emphasis on communication.