Abstract:

The Joint School of Design and Innovation (JSDI), inaugurated in Xi'an (China) on 7 September 2019, is Politecnico di Milano's first campus outside Italy. The JSDI is an international platform dedicated to education and research. Combining an Italian creative and multidisciplinary approach with Chinese expertise in large-scale engineering projects, this Joint School aims to deliver innovative and interdisciplinary study programs and to promote joint research projects between academia and industry.
Global crises played an important role in this integration, as the SARS-COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down activities for some years. In the Academic Year 2022-23, the first year of the BSc in Engineering-Industrial Design at JSDI ran. The degree course has a faculty consisting of POLIMI and XJTU professors. Students will receive both Italian and Chinese degrees at the end of the four-year program. Therefore, creating a teaching plan to work on cultural integration is essential.
Industrial Design is closely linked to learning three-dimensional graphics visualization, and the approaches and methods used within the university can influence future generations of designers. During the second semester, the first face-to-face course related to the Design area that the students had to take with a POLIMI teacher was the Concept Visualization Tools II (CVT2) course. This course covered the area of representation tools for Design and techniques for creating digital renderings from three-dimensional digital models. This course is the natural continuation of its namesake, Concept Visualization Tools I (CVT1), which covered creating three-dimensional models for the concept using surface modelling software. Due to the local COVID policy, CVT1 took place online during the first semester.
The peculiarity of this subject has led the teaching staff to take an empirical teaching approach while not forgetting the theoretical aspects. The goal is to train students' observation skills and attention to detail in parallel with their ability to adapt to different contexts.
Starting from the theorists who, through their contributions to the literature, delineate the boundaries of design knowledge, the article will emphasize the need to redefine the educational tasks of designer education by shifting from an artefact production orientation to a cognitive-constructive and a metacognitive approach. The empathic component in the didactic approach also constitutes a fundamental building block.
This article reports the experience of a group of lecturers who worked extensively on defining the program of the Concept Visualization Tools II course. All contents, from software to the topics covered, were carefully chosen and planned. This teaching method has proven effective in improving not only the technical skills of the students but also the professional and cultural qualities of future young designers.

Keywords:

Design learning, reflective practice, design metacognition, design cognition, multi-cultural integration.