CLab Torino: a transdisciplinary environment to provide a challenge-based teaching model

Abstract

Promoting an open dialogue, a constant interdisciplinary collaboration with companies, between universities, about partnership or open innovation perspective, today is a challenge that still faces some resistance. Learning to deal with complexity, with the coexistence of different points of view, in collaboration to combined and re-combined know-how in ever new, original and challenging formulations, brings with its specific needs. In this sense, design takes on a fundamental role to create projects with a view to sustainable innovation, projects that are increasingly responsive to contemporary complexity. So, how does design education need to change? How do working designers and design researchers can update their skills to meet the challenges of the present and future?This contribution, through the experimentation of the Contamination Lab Torino, investigates a new education model intended as an extremely dynamic process from the creation of a multidisciplinary design team to the transition from a product design logic to a Product Service System one, as the most effective way to face the issue of the system management, as a way to guarantee the appropriate flexibility to the contemporary needs of our society.