Facing today's challenges with a new mindset

Design emerges as the disruptive agent to break the status quo and generate questions that provoke significant changes. Creativity, in this sense, has the power to evolve all disciplines and through the design perspective, we can generate innovation, understanding it as a flexible and adaptable tool to any context and allowing to deliver sustainable outcomes.

Tomorrow’s designers and design-minded professionals need to handle today’s complexies and work across discipline boundaries, transcending existing paradigms of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and shape the leading edge of design in non-disciplinary, participatory environments. Transform from an ego-system to an eco-system. 

Transdisciplinary design aims at re-framing the boundaries between products, systems, environments, interfaces disciplines and content. It offers a collaborative approach to integrating bodies of knowledge and evolving new ways of working, rooted in design-minded action, that will facilitate better innovation in contexts of great complexity. 

Design as the new facilitator

 

Design requires an evolving and flexible approach to delivering sustainable solutions through the windows of technology, business and human drivers. For this reason, emerges as an important role of facilitator rather than solver, with an attitude open to interpretation rather than concrete solutions. As a result, design has expanded its field of action becoming a more participatory discipline and delivering systemic thinking. 

A Critical Agenda for the Planet 

 

Designers will be needed to address the complex global challenges we all face with a transdisciplinary mindset. At IED, we focus on the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations to find the solutions for the world’s next big transformations. To do so, a transdisciplinary approach will help find new sustainable proposals that can be relevant to people’s lives. 

 

Which challenges need a transdisciplinary, creative and innovative approach?

Mobility

Global Warming

Healthcare

Immigration

Education

Security

Urban Development

Agrifood system

Interviews 

Transdisciplinary Collective Studio

IED has created a studio-based structure with multidisciplinary modules providing a perspective that enables problem framing and problem setting activities within a collaborative framework.

It is an inclusive and stimulating place where knowledge flows and debates thrive. The participants are enclosed in a pervasive atmosphere. The studio is centered on a constant exchange between teachers and students to encourage critical thinking, boost individual creativity, and foster collective work.

The crossover between disciplines is the device to approach “wicked” multifaceted problems in contemporary cities and trigger new and disruptive design solutions. Learning by doing is the studio approach to engage students in all the processes of urban design: imaging, representing, communicating, producing, and managing. 

The collective studio is an engaging place; it provides opportunities for students to gain challenging practical experience through internships or other hands-on learning opportunities. This might include working with community organizations or government agencies on real-world placemaking projects. 

Projects

Highlights

Related courses

Editorial project by Jacopo Manganiello