Design education learning: developing skills of observing and managing intangible system in young generations

Abstract

[EN] There is consensus among researchers regarding how managing and designing in complexity multidimensionality represents one of the mains challenges and constants of contemporaries’ processes of innovation (Manzini, Baule, Bertola, 2004). This systemic distinguishing peculiarity makes impossible to standardize the design innovation processes because every problem needs to be solved by adopting different strategies (Celaschi, Deserti, 2007). Nevertheless, those innovative processes can be developed and managed by referring us to tools and practices of design into the paradigms of multidisciplinary and multidimensional. However, what happens when professors have to transmit those concepts to young students of design faculties? We have to consider that normally those students are coming from second-degree schools, which programs usually still insist on content rigidly divided in disciplines and don´t consider how the contemporary relation between space and time has overturned for them (Morin, 2001). Young students generally disclaim their past in the meaning of heritage, values and techniques knowledge; they live in the present, a time that does not exist; a time that today results enormously expanded by globalization processes. They still living in a reality of which territorial capital subsystems are characterized by an entropic strong dichotomy of entities in opposition but, on the other hand, in balance within themselves, as for example topics as material/immaterial, collective/identity, culture/industry, etc. So, which are the design didactic challenges to provide horizontal skills for allowing young students to understand complexity and manage knowledge of the reality? This article will discuss the case study of the perception among design of a newly generation admitted at the Innovation and Design Engineering Degree of the Universidad Panamericana – Guadalajara Campus. As expected, in this new generation we can especially observe a resistance to consider the sociocultural, business, technological and territorial dimensions as systems that strategically characterized and affected plural aspects of the design innovation processes. The contribute then proceed in analyzing case studies of didactic activities for creating skills and sensibility able to develop this capability to observe, select and manage the intangible in order to optimize the design of the tangible in the young generations. The investigation, through the experimentation and comparison of informal didactic model, bring to the identification and promotion of special extra-ordinary didactics experiences oriented to the complex project and able to resalt the designer mediation role among the innate and dualistic tension between polarities able to resalt the intangible aspects which characterized contemporary design processes.