Introductory courses Main courses Elective courses Dissertation

Contents of the courses Introductory courses Industrial Design and Multimedial Communication: 1. year Applied Informatics Credits: 5 Description of the course: The hypertext as a new literary expression tool: hyper textual structures and architectures, related technologies, Internet, new communication paradigms, synaesthetic and hypertext, historical roots of the knowledge organisation; designing an hypertext: how to organise the goals, the architecture, the content, the graphic presentation and the navigation. Hints on technologies. Semiotics Credits: 5 Description of the course: Fundamentals of semiotics for verbal and multimedia texts design and analysis, having pragmatics as a focus, in the sense of a dimension of sense. Semantics and logics stand beside as complementary supports, applied to three dimensions of expression: symbols, icons and signals. The same fundamentals are articulated for the material artefact. Theories and History of Industrial design Credits: 5 Description of the course: The course deals with the history of some family of products, and particularly it explores the relation between artefacts and socio-technical systems, as well as the lessons about these topics. The course will make a suggestion on strategies of research about specific products, and a reflection on the leading role of multimedia technologies to organise and to show the result of the research. Industrial Design: 2. year Industrial Design Lab Credits: 10 Description of the course: The objective of the laboratory is to offer the basic disciplinary elements for the design of artefacts. Didactic approach is based on design practice, centred on exercises of design problem solving, verification and control of design hypothesis, towards the theoretical formulation through practice. The theoretical and practice activities will face design features in their wider articulation. Multimedial Communication: 2. year Visual Communication Lab Credits: 10 Description of the course: The objective of the laboratory is to offer the students, basic disciplinary elements for design of communicative artefacts. Didactic approach is based on the practices of experimentation, centred on exercises of problem solving, verification and control of conjectures, for the theoretical formulation through practice. The theoretical and practice activities will face perceptive problems in their representative visual restitution - static and kinetics - but multisensorial as well. Main courses Industrial Design and Multimedial Communication: 1. year Policies of Knowledge Credits: 5 Description of the course: The course is meant to explore the models and procedures of interaction between the specific investigations carried out in the filed of industrial design and multimedia communication, and the wider, more general policies of knowledge creation, managing and exploitment. In order to attain such an objective, lectures will offer informative and critical tools suitable to direct the doctoral student in his/her research activity, assessing its relevance and value in terms of social, techno-scientific and cultural aims of the institutional research policies and programs expressed at national and international scale. Designing Research Credits: 10 Description of the course: the lectures are meant to progressively introduce the doctoral candidates to design research on the basis of two main articulations: the strategic planning of research (through consolidated research frameworks, favoured research paths for industrial design, active research domains and emerging domains) and the models for research programs. National, communitarian and international research frameworks will be the enlarged context of reference. Main task of the course is to offer the students suitable tools (conceptual as well as operative) to carry on research proposals and programs. Industrial Design and Multimedial Communication: 2. year English for scientific writing Credits: 2,5 Description of the course: A course of special English for scientific writing, including main guidelines for paper submission, scientific reports articulation, paper formats and refereed journals guidelines for authors. Divulging Research Credits: 5 Description of the course: The course is meant to consolidate the idea that no research activity can be done in absence of the correspondent capability of communicating and divulging its procedures and results, being such a communication articulated according to the community of reference. Main task of the course is to offer the student suitable tools to articulate communication for: research teams, the scientific community as a reference and the enlarged public outreach. The course will provide conceptual tools, relevant case history presentation and support for application in the research areas of any student practice. Industrial Design and Multimedial Communication: 3. year Practising Research Credits: 10 Description of the course: The course is meant to introduce research activity as a complex system whose practice requires adequate procedures of assessment and managing. Lessons will offer the students the effective tools for a project manager multiple functions, as well as a map of research methodologies investing specific domains. The course will provide conceptual tools, relevant case history presentation, and support for application in the research areas of any students practice. Industrial Design: 2. year Design Phenomenologies Credits: 5 Description of the course: the course is meant to offer an outline of the system of artefacts and of its recent evolutive dynamics, shaping culture and practice of industrial design as a consequence. Specifically, a focus will be kept on the concept of product-system, meant as a complex of products, services and communication, converging in the concreteness of a socially recognisable value. Suitable tools to face the increasing complexity of product design domains will be offered, extending from materials design, interaction design, service design and strategic design. Design Methodologies Credits: 5 Description of the course: The multidimensional reality of the product system makes possible a variety of different approaches to design. The design of the product-system implies a disciplinary perspective that is not self-sufficient, because a trans disciplinary and collective praxis is required, denying both the isolated action and the unilateral disciplinary approach. The course’s aim is to foster the knowledge of the variety of perspectives - through the analysis of remarkable case studies - and competencies involved by the design of the product-system. Simulated cases and compared experiences of design methodologies will be analysed, without any predetermined assessment of value. Multimedial Communication: 2. year Phenomenologies of Communication Design Credits: 5 Description of the course: The course will mainly face the transformations induced by new technologies on the communicative artefacts and the consequent reconfiguration of the map of the communicative artefacts themselves. The didactic approach will be interdisciplinary, the instruments of involved visions investing multiple disciplines technology, psychology of perception, sociology, economy, etc. - being part of such transformations. Methodologies of Communication Design Credits: 5 Description of the course: the Transition Laboratory. Effects of the transition to the digital in the structure and languages of communicative artefacts. Transition artefacts: characters and changes. Design of new graphic peritext; page system and screen system. Hypertextualization of the media and the media process of artefact: hybrid format and new technologies. Conditioning effects among artefact systems. Design of visibility in the net. Integration of contents /services/ products in the net. Plans and hypermedia maps: notational analytical and projectual systems for web artefacts. Elective courses Seminars for both Industrial Design and Multimedial Communication: Within the activities of the elective training the relevant factors of the demand of design will be assumed as the basic thematic for the lectures, seminars and research practice, assuming that this demand of design takes progressively shape in a context made of theoretical reflection, manufacturing strategies and organisational assets of industry and society. The in progress and all pervading nature of design will be assumed as the natural trajectory sustaining a multi-thematic program, articulated in the following disciplinary contents: 2. year Contributions to a phenomenology of design Design research as the configuration of products, services, strategies and communicative artefacts Contributions to a praxis of design Design research as methodologies for design Contributions to an epistemology of design Design research as the design ways of knowing 3. year Contributions to the research of innovation Research for and within the innovative processes of industrial and communication design. Dissertation The final objective of the doctoral dissertation is an original contribution to the knowledge of industrial design or multimedia communication, obtained through research activity. The originality of such a contribution has to be described, made explicit and documented, so to be communicable. As a license for the profession of research in industrial design and multimedia communication, the doctorate implies a demonstration of skills and knowledge organised in a specific way. Research skills involved will require either ability in the analysis of sources, literature and data, as well as ability in selecting the adequate research methods, if and where formalised. In this sense the dissertation will require an explicit demonstration of research skills, as well as the originality and values of results. If it is not an easy task to understand what is an original contribution to research, this is even more critical when dealing with disciplines - industrial design among them - still in their normalised although advanced definition, and traditionally advocating a multidisciplinary nature. However, here it will be assumed that the objective of the doctoral dissertation will be to offer an original contribution to industrial design or multimedia design in terms of: a relevant improvement to the knowledge of industrial design or multimedia communication; the identification of a new form of knowledge within industrial design or multimedia communication; the discovery of a new remarkable fact in the domain of industrial design or multimedia communication; the development of innovative research methods in industrial design or multimedia communication; the development of innovative approaches to design; the positioning of consolidated knowledge in an innovative perspective; the development of innovative approaches to consolidated knowledge in industrial design and multimedia communication; the organisation of acquired knowledge according to innovative approaches and procedures.