Abstract:

Guest speaking from the world of work motivates master design students and provides them with knowledge, awareness and professional perspective, promoting active learning. 

Furthermore students tend to perceive guest speaking as expert figure, able to bring them in contact with the real world and therefore to have a more concrete and effective experience. Thanks also to distance learning, this year students were able to deal with e-guests who in other situations would not have been able to participate.

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of business companies into the teaching methodology, active collaboration has helped to clarify goals and contents of the design studio. Thanks to these different speeches, students were able to understand the changes that have taken place in the design of work spaces, in order to respond to new needs and behaviors. This stimulated the students to design, making the course objectives clearer and bringing them to a higher level of detail that allowed them to focus better on the needs of contemporary man.

The design studio named “Laboratorio di sintesi finale” of the Master's Degree in Interior and Spatial Design of Politecnico di Milan faced the connection between man, work and integrated well-being, showing the importance of the centrality of man in contemporary design. The aim of this course is to design an interior space with a human centered approach, made of a wide collection of activity-based settings to be shared creating blended environments for office working (Activity based Habitats), where the user is freed from the need to use a fixed station but can use different ones depending on the activity to be performed.

The importance of the relationship between space and human well-being was supported and confirmed by the guest companies who talked about well-being at work through their experiences and approaches.

Herman Miller, specialized in office furniture, was  the first host company. It showed how the company itself revolutionized contemporary work environments with the introduction of living office, bringing well-being to workspaces by creating a space to live able to satisfy the needs of human beings, his activities and to improve his experiences through the creation of new settings.

The topic of the second company that participated was well-being of man in the design of spaces. Microsoft Italia described the design of Microsoft House, which has radically transformed the work environment. This was carried out by involving employees directly, who built an internal research team for collecting requests and then designing a space based on human needs.

The last company that participated was Generali with its Energy Hub, an entire floor dedicated to the world of integrated welfare for the employees in their headquarters. This also marks a new step in developing the brand towards a more holistic wellness approach. The company highlighted how workplace well-being is created in many ways, from team-building to physical activity.

These companies tackled the issue of work well-being with different gradients and showed students trends, issues relating to this period and their future profession.

Thanks to this experience emerged that - in future courses - would be appropriate to identify and define the specific moment in which involve the company in the studio, in order to better evaluate effectiveness and impact that the company has on the development of the project.

Keywords:

Guest speaking, distance learning, office space.