Design Education from Kindergarten to PhD – Design Learning for Tomorrow: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers

Several literatures acknowledge that design education has been shifting from the mere training of young students to be skilled professionals to a more profound understanding of the social context in which the future designs will emerge (Norman, 2010) (Findeli, 2001)(Frascara, 2007). This comes from the increased understanding that in order to craft sustainable and viable products, being material or virtual, students have to refer in the first place to their living environment and feed their creativity with the challenges experienced in real life. For educators this starts firstly an investigation on how to guide their students in the exploration of the wellknown and therefore unquestioned events they experience, and secondly on how these experiences can be articulated into design projects. The particularity of the case study reported in this paper, comes from the multidisciplinary team of professors, from communication design and computer engineering, and the novelty of the project brief dealing with the intricate topic of intercultural communication and social integration on the Italian and Milanese territory (Granata, 2011) (Pedersen, 1995, 2004).