Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the university course to make use of digital technologies more and more for didactic purposes; this phenomenon led to several experimentations that provide actionable knowledge relevant to re-think educational models in post-pandemic time.

In this paper, it is presented the experience of a digital event held within a mentoring program in a Design university. The event took place with the use of a digital tool for a web call (in this case zoom was used) and a digital whiteboard (in this case miro was used).

The program aims to be a formative activity to support the didactics of the students of the [name of the course], focused on an area of difficult integration into the curriculum of the course: the transition from students to professionals. The event aimed to make students critically reflect on their future as design practitioners through an activity mediated by a digital whiteboard. The event was divided into two phases, the first phase was frontal and meant to provide a set of contents to students, the second phase instead was designed to be more dynamic and aimed to make students critically reflect on the previously presented contents.

The first moment was organized in collaboration with the career service of the university to provide an overview of the employability of former students of the course, and a second moment was organized with an informal organization of practitioners which presented ongoing research on the transformation of the role of the designers in the market.

Thus, the second phase consisted in a first interactive moment where the mentees of the program were divided in small groups in breakout rooms and had three questions, linked to the topic presented, to be discussed. Later the groups returned to the main room of the call to report the main insights of the discussion to the rest of the class.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this event to comprehend how the digital platforms could enhance and support the critical discussion of didactic contents and therefore how this experimentation can inform current educational models to improve and adapt to the modern and post-pandemic needs of didactic.

At the basis of the project, there is a network of relationships among students and alumni, aiming to provide professional growth and be able to create those natural and enriching meetings, usually happening in the physical campus, now canceled or reduced because of the limitations of in-presence learning. Within this context lies indeed the necessity to study how the serendipity and more in general the discussion usually happening in physical presence can be replicated with the use of digital technologies.

Four chapters will be included in this paper. The first section will provide background information on the subject, explain the paper's structure, and emphasize the article's research questions. The second section will provide the theoretical context of the experimentation and define the research area. The third chapter will briefly describe the format developed for the event, including methods of inquiry and examples of the format's results. Finally, the final chapter will summarize the findings and make recommendations for future research based on these reflections on how the experience adds to the body of knowledge.

Keywords:

Service Design, Design Education, Mentoring program, Didactic Innovation, Digital.