Abstract:

This paper intends to report the experience as a Visiting Professor in the Design Department of the Politecnico of Milano and to approach the Design Laboratory as a priority and distinguishing feature of the Polytechnic Design System. The concept of the Design Laboratory refers to a multidisciplinary team of teachers, designers, researchers and technicians who guide the didactic and research activities of the students and who promote innovation as part of the process, through observation, experimentation, cognitive construction thinking, cooperative work, and the theory-practice relationship. Its scope is to acquire conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and practical bases by students to deal with product design issues. It is a space that considers learning as a product of a teaching process involving the student's direct experience.

Furthermore, this work aims to highlight aspects of the teaching and learning process of Higher Education in Fashion Design in Italy. Education differs drastically from country to country due to different educational systems, various demands from the workplace, and perceptions concerning Fashion Design as an academic discipline. In other words, Italian Higher Education works with experimental activities to define tools and methods to train professionals capable of responding to the needs of the industrial context, with the appropriate technical and cultural knowledge and the mindset oriented to the typical project methodologies of Design disciplines. In Italy, the culture of Design has always been an "art craft", which involves four main aspects:
(1) The culture of research as a support for creativity, which cannot be considered as an innate attribute without didactic and methodological support;
(2) Knowledge of the technical dimension of the products should not be reduced to the learning of cutting and sewing techniques;
(3) Knowledge of the meta-project dimension, which is a structured, complex, and methodical activity;
(4) The apprehension of the dimension of products, which are complex entities, based on the interaction between people, products, and places.

The literature points out that, in an interrelated and complex current situation, Design is an irrefutable resource capable of leading production systems to new models of development, considering diversity and the plurality of identity, as well as finding solutions resulting from interdisciplinary interactions and hybrid between diverse methodologies and skills. Consequently, there is increasingly clear evidence that the formation of the future designer must be understood as a process, creating a dialogue between society and the academic community to generate interdisciplinary and contextualized knowledge.

The locus of the research was the KnitLab of the Politecnico di Milano, the most recent laboratory of the Polytechnic Design System System, which allows the learning and mastery of craft and industrial techniques with which future Fashion Designers can exercise their creativity. At the same time, companies find valuable space to collaborate with new research and experiments in this laboratory. The methodological design used in the development of the research was Participant Observation, whose centrality is the long type of permanence in the field and participation in the social world.


Keywords:

Knitwear, Laboratory, Fashion Design, Italian Higher Education, Visiting Professor.