Abstract:

This paper presents the activities and the results achieved during an international and collaborative class, involving B.Sc. and M.Sc. students from two European Schools of Design. Two schools organised a collaborative workshop during the Milano Design Week (MDW), one of the most acknowledged and famous events related to design culture and practice.This workshop was focused on onsite and online collaboration among 35 design students from different universities, backgrounds, and cultural and social determinants to reflect on current and future global issues and on the designer’s role in facing them, and to define a concept and envision design solutions for the near-future world.
The activity was structured in four phases:
- a field and trend research during the MDW for collecting stimuli;
- a design sprint to discuss the gathered info and propose a preliminary concept;
- a remote collaboration to foresee and develop the concept;
- a final event for presenting the project.
More specifically, during the MDW, groups of B.Sc. and M.Sc. Italian and Spanish students visited the Salone del Mobile and other exhibitions, gathering information and stimuli on current trends and those foreseen by companies, designers, and other exhibitors. These visits were partly led by the lecturers and partly managed autonomously by the students, according to their cultural and design interests. Among all and guided by the lecturers, these are some topics investigated by the students:
- Design trends for artefacts and spaces: form and shape, function, use, materials, manufacturing processes, markets, etc.
- From the functional dimension to the aesthetical and the emotional one: the artefact affecting human behaviour, producing new meanings and experiences, etc.
- Design Theories and Methodologies: from Human-centred to more-than-human and post-human design; from anthropocentric to post-anthropocentric theories.
- Design Sustainability: from life-cycle design to sustainability and circularity.
- Design Manufacturing: from large-scale products to digital fabrication.
- Design and 4.0 Industrial Revolution, AI, robotics, IoT, etc.
At the end of the week, they collaborated in a Design Sprint to organise the data collected and start defining a concept, dealing with product typology, paying particular attention to: form and shape, material features and innovative variations; product life cycle, sustainability and circularity; the possibilities of interaction offered (e.g., channels and contexts) and the overall user experience.
From the end of MDW and the final presentation, students have worked together thanks to online sessions and discussed the projects both locally and online with all the lecturers. The final concept has been presented during an online presentation.
The general scope of the collaborative class was to nudge the students in fostering their critical thinking thanks to peer-to-peer exchange in research and design activities, and consciously reflecting on their professional, cultural and social role as designers.
The paper presents the collaborative workshop, focusing on its activities’ framework mixing formal and informal teaching with active and experiential learning. Then, it presents the results achieved by the students and discusses positive and negative aspects of students’ involvement and cooperation.

Keywords:

Collaborative class, design practice, trend research, active learning.