Istitutional function The doctorate program is articulated into two directories: Industrial design Industrial design, following the meaning adopted within this doctorate, is intended as a discipline acting within the industrial culture and accompanying its transformations. Among its main tasks is to deal with industrial products configuration as well as with all those factors investing the process of shaping products themselves. In this sense, this school specific meaning goes to use, function, social and individual consumption of the products (the functional, symbolical and cultural factors) as to manufacturing (techno-economical, techno-systemically, techno-productive and techno-distributive factors). Through the lenses of such a perspective, adequate relevance is recognised to product planning, service design or further remarkable border areas intersecting different disciplines, such as multimedial communication, technological innovation, firm organisation, management and environmental planning. All themes are expected to be faced with the support of the conceptual tools of research in its theoretical, critical, historical and methodological articulations. Multimedia communication On its side, the section of communication design is meant to provide a suitable training to the resolution of complex problems in the field of multimedia communication. The training program - based on historical, critical, theoretical and planning approaches - will involve the design of communication in any applied aspect: from the design of interfaces to the design of communication systems (tele-education, e-commerce, data banks), from corporate image manuals to communicative strategies, from typographic design to the design of icons and signals. The program contents are expected to face the resolution of visual communication and communication design either with conventional technologies or with multimedia-multisensorial ones.