IED SQUARE 2025
TOGETHER APART

Deeply personal and radically collective

The world around us is unstable, hyperconnected, marked by contradictions and rapid shifts: news overwhelms us, crises multiply, and artificial intelligence is weaving itself into every aspect of our lives, transforming how we learn, design, and relate to one another.

We are constantly connected through screens, feeds and networks, and yet we often feel alone. Our phones have become extensions of our hands, and yet we feel disconnected from our bodies, from others, and from the environment around us.

Within this confusion lies an extraordinary opportunity, because it is precisely in times of instability that new forms of creativity and collaboration emerge. Design becomes an active tool for survival and imagination, capable of connecting and activating diverse forms of intelligence and exploring new ways of cooperating among — and beyond — human beings.

In this context, artificial intelligence is not merely a technology: it is a cognitive environment, a design agent, a counterpart to understand and co-create with, by exploring its ethical, ecological, social and cultural implications. Not to adapt to change, but to inhabit it consciously.

To navigate this landscape, IED opens spaces for reflection and experimentation such as IED SQUARE: a transdisciplinary platform where students, lecturers, experts and creatives come together to question the present and imagine the future.

From Milan to Rome, from Turin to Cagliari, IED Square 2025 presents a series of events that place dialogue at the centre — between human and non-human, between data and identity, between emotions and algorithms. An invitation to explore new forms of intelligence – individual, collective, artificial – and to rethink design as an open, inclusive and transformative space.

Each IED campus contributes with a unique perspective.

In Milan, design is reimagined by including the non-human as an active participant, envisioning inclusive design ecologies between humans and “more-than-human” intelligences.

In Rome, the focus is on how AI influences learning, identity and emotions, questioning the role of imagination and awareness in contemporary education.

In Turin, the reflection centres on how data and artificial intelligence can help build resilient communities, addressing bias and invisibility in our digital spaces.

In Cagliari, AI is imagined as a shared language between humans and nature, a new ecosystem capable of listening, responsibility and environmental co-design.