Design teaching and cultural companies. Languages, tools and methods toward a profitable involvement.

The topic of this paper is to focus on the relationship between design teaching and the different kinds of cultural partners in the field of cultural design. In this context we mean the company as a cultural company. In fact cultural production is increasingly a lively area of intervention and of business. We assume that it is very important to involve the real interlocutors in the process of design teaching, especially in the field of cultural design where the complexity of the system is an interesting pretext to create useful situations. Specifically we study the relationship between the design disciplines and the humanities sciences as a basis to know the methodologies to enable the contact and the synergies with the cultural institutions (museum, territory communities, etc.). In fact museums, associations, communities of the territories are mainly managed by profiles that come from the humanities. The hypothesis is that design teaching programmes can be a necessary tool to put innovation in the cultural system (in the specific realities) and (symmetrically) the cultural partners are an important field of experimentation, but for this target it is necessary that design develops the tools and specific modality of dialogue. Two different experiences of design teaching will be explained where the relationship between design and anthropology represents a model of collaboration. The first one regards an intervention (in terms of strategic and exhibit design research) in the Anthropological Museum in Florence; the second one regards a cluster of interventions (in terms of strategic, communication and exhibit design research) about the cultural identity of the Italian Alpine area (partner involved: Regione Lombardia). In the latter case we worked mainly on immaterial cultural heritage (festivals, rituals, gestures, knowledge, etc.).