Abstract:

With the appearance of Covid19, as of February 24th 2020, the Politecnico di Milano has transferred all teaching activities to online platforms, guaranteeing the smooth running of the semester. After a complicated year of responsibility and dedication, social and psychological emptiness, transformations and accelerations, Politecnico has felt the need to listen carefully to an 'obligatory' change of step, to monitor with acuity the evolving teaching and learning methods.

Aware of the ongoing incredible mutations in the ways of living didactic spaces, education activities and social relations, in June 2020, the Academic Senate of the Politecnico di Milano has indicated some possible trajectories of innovation, involving different areas of investigation such as distance learning, the use of teaching spaces, international relations, campus life, student mobility. Moreover, since December 2020, Politecnico has been holding round-table discussions with various university components and stakeholders. These actions accelerated previous efforts to elaborate innovative learning environment to adapt to modern needs (Manciaracina, 2019).

In this framework, the School of Design has contributed with an accurate reflection on the future of teaching, between the physical and digital dimensions. Thanks to various initiatives, it has involved the entire design community, gathering indications and suggestions on how to manage the teaching when the pandemic will be over. The attempt was to turn this period of challenges into an opportunity to seize the positive elements to make them a starting point for the next steps that academia will face; to introduce a design thinking approach, able to drive the intuitive spark that leaps across the gap separating the university education learning as it is from the university education learning as it might be (Martin, 2009).

In this sense, the School of Design has made and effort to overcome a conventional approach to the issue. It has suggested a method of design driven innovation (Verganti, 2009) devised in three main actions: listening to the design community (gaining access to knowledge), interpreting the weaknesses and strengths of the current education challenges (assessing the knowledge) and addressing future visions (preparing the ground for groundbreaking proposals).

This paper explores a dense data collection process that involved professors and students at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano, counting (in 10 days): 12 participatory workshops, 9 areas of discussion, 510 teachers and 4247 students involved. All these phases have been organized in enlarge co-design sessions (Meroni et al., 2018) thanks to the use of digital interaction tools. As a final result, the data, analyzed and clustered through a horizontal and a vertical synthesis, generated six key scenarios, not presenting future unrealistic visions, rather directional rails in the post-pandemic educational, social and space-use dimensions.

Keywords:

Learning environment, participatory, learning scenarios, hybrid learning contexts.