Abstract:

Sustainable development is a crucial point for the research and the planning of innovative scenarios in the Design field; Sustainability not only in environmental or economic terms but also social, designing projects and practises that pursue the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the Union Nation for a better future.
The paper aims to present the experience of a consolidated network of Design Schools, GIDE (Group for International Design Education), which was able to transform itself during the pandemic to provide an innovative, collaborative didactic experience to the students on sustainable issues.

The international collaboration networks have faced a delicate challenge during the year of the pandemic. Covid-19 has suddenly blocked not only business trips but also those moments of international exchange. Exchange moments thanks to several generations of students and researchers have been formed in the past. Among the established educational networks, particular importance acquires the ones dedicated to Design: the teaching of design is traditionally carried out using inductive methods, that is "based on experience”. Applied exercises that feed the students reflective knowledge and are based on the complementary of many different disciplines, belonging to design, humanistic or technologic areas. Like all the educational forms that belong to “know-how”, design had to explore innovative and experimental practices during the forced distance imposed by the pandemic. At the same time, the networks had to imagine different modes of collaborative working.

GIDE was formally established in 2003 and is a unique network of eight higher education art and design institutions which evolved from an earlier inter-cultural network established in the nineties. GIDE exists to enrich the intercultural experiences of students, educators and institutions by providing opportunities for collaboration, benchmarking, and knowledge exchange.

Every year GIDE organizes in a different city a design workshop in which around 150 students from all over Europe take part.

In 2021 GIDE has managed to re-design first of all the interactions model but also re-thought the didactical offer. It was a double challenge: the first one, more accessible, was to find digital instruments for designing together but apart. The second challenge, more ambitious, was to inspire projects and reflections on current and frontier themes connected to sustainable and global issues, considering the pandemic situation that everyone is currently living in. The aim was to promote the exchange and the shared knowledge among students from different countries and Design Schools on the potential of designing imperfection into an imperfect world.

From the broader theme “Learning from Nature”, more specific ones were identified. In particular, the paper focus on the value of imperfection in the evolutionary and innovative process faced by Polytechnic of Milan and Lubiana’s Faculty of Design’ students. From observing the role of “imperfection” in the biology field and evolution theories and exploring art, literature, design, the students developed ideas through creatives exercise to design sustainable scenarios for the future.

Keywords:

Imperfection, design, sustainable design, collaborative networks.