Effectiveness of Studio based learning in collaboration with companies in Design&Engineering Master Course at Politecnico di Milano

The competition between territories, the goal to attract people and investments, the capacity to prefigure local sustainable development represent new opportunities to reflect about design theories and practices. Defining a "portrait" of an area, visualizing the specific features, enhancing the different levels of territorial resources are actions related to the refinement of design methods and practices. These activities are developed through a discussion and a synergy with other disciplines and also through the ability to build relationships and coordinating actions between different local stakeholders. The design for territories also represents an integrated approach into the design discipline: strategic design and services design to build scenarios, to propose design visions of local development using some themes of sensemaking such as the brand as collector of a coordinated system of the territorial offer. In 2008, Poli.Design (consortium of Politecnico di Milano) has promoted an advanced training course "Brand for the Territorial Systems" on these themes. The multidisciplinary approach and the design practice in real contexts are the main characteristics of the didactic model. In the first two editions, these methods have been applied in two Italian contexts: the territory of Ostuni and San Pellegrino Terme. This is an original didactic approach that regards different aspects: - the focus on design for the exploitation of the territorial resources (territorial capital) as the main theme of the projects; - the application of the multidisciplinary theoretical tools in real contexts (field activities). The results are related to different levels: - a training of a complex professional profile able to interact with business and institutional environments and also with the main competencies acting in local contexts; - the learning of conceptual and operational capabilities that integrate strategic vision and the ability to manage projects in term of product-system design (services, communications, products) didactical structure, basing on the idea of “learning by doing”. [1] [4] Design studios lead in terms of time and effort the formative career of the students. All theoretical modules support and complement design studios, following the parallelism between “knowing” and “knowing how to do”. [2] [3] In particular, in Design&Engineering Master Course this parallelism is always reinforced by the presence of both teachers mainly conveying the “knowing” part and professionals/technicians conveying the “knowing how to do” part. Design&Engineering Master Course is an inter-faculty course where contributions from industrial design and engineering field are present in both theoretical classes and in design studios. The design studio projects usually evolve following steps from idea generation, to concept and to design definition [5], which are continuously supervised by professors and professionals from different design and engineering disciplines and by technicians from companies. It is thought that involving companies in the didactical activity can reinforce the “knowing how to do” portion of education, making students aware of the professional routine in design projects where creative and technical skills blend and the ability of working in a multidisciplinary context is therefore necessary. A case study is presented to show a typical studio learning experience in collaboration with a company in Design&Engineering MC, and feedbacks from students are summarized.