Abstract:

This paper illustrates the experience of the School of Design at Politecnico di Milano within the Italian POT NEED project (New Empathic Educational Design), which involves 18 Italian universities active in design education. The project aims to establish an educational network on core design themes, according to a perspective of increasing personalisation oriented towards student wellbeing, engaging secondary schools and universities.

NEED promotes education through design, understood as an integrated system of methods, processes and tools, responding to the requirements of the societal changes. One of the fundamental prerogatives of NEED is to support secondary school students in making informed choices regarding their university path, counteracting the phenomenon of student dropout.

In this context, the School of Design has developed an articulated orientation activity founded on the three pillars of its design education: knowing, knowing how to do, and knowing how to be. The School of Design bases its educational model on learning rooted in a vision that interweaves theory and practice in an integrated approach to education, capable of nurturing designers able to know (theoretical contents and concepts), know how to do (technical knowledge and competences), and know how to be (critical and life skills).

We present the experience of the “Design Pathways” project, conducted in three editions (October 2024, March 2025, and October 2025), which comprehensively involved hundreds of secondary school students, student tutors from the School of Design, and university lecturers. The project is articulated in several interconnected activities: experiencing the campus and discovering design at Politecnico di Milano, visiting the technological facilities, understanding design disciplines through presentations and direct dialogues, and concretely experimenting with learning by doing through workshop-based laboratories.

This experiential approach enables students to immerse themselves in the university educational ecosystem, surpassing the purely informative dimension of traditional orientation. The adopted methodology valorises peer-to-peer exchange between secondary school students and university tutors, favouring processes of identification and construction of realistic expectations. Laboratory activities also allow students to directly experience design processes and the didactic methodologies characteristic of design, offering them concrete tools to evaluate their own aptitude and motivation.

The objective of this contribution is to propose a replicable orientation protocol (comprising processes, tools, and actors involved) for other universities at an international level, founded on the integration of experiential dimensions, empathic relationships, and design pedagogy. The data collected across are analysed to understand the effectiveness of this approach in fostering informed choices and reducing the risk of university dropout. The “Design Pathways” model thus configures itself as an innovative response to contemporary educational challenges, promoting a culture of design as a tool for personal and social empowerment, capable of orienting young people towards educational paths coherent with their own aspirations and competencies.

Keywords:

Design Education, University Orientation, Experiential Learning.