Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Crafting finds powerful roots where new makers professions, hybridized or even derived from traditional design, merge and contrast with the classic designer, not always finding a clear professional position and sometimes lacking a clear previous training profile. Such design and production scenario requires urgent structural intervention to organize its evolution through the education of new competences in the ways of interacting with the territory, among themselves and confronting each other in a metadisciplinary way with the tools provided by the technological innovation. One of the most relevant environments where the aforementioned interventions should be set up are the schools, in particular, but not only, universities. Education should prepare new designers not only to be ready in the design field but also to be able to manage their knowledge and work within makerspaces and fablabs; those are still evolving, not necessarily looking for a stable condition, for dynamic ones. To make this asset clearer, the research analyzed different case studies (Fablab Torino - ITA; Noisebridge - San Francisco, US; The Shop.Build - San Francisco, US; Circuit Launch - Oakland, US; Digital Fabrication Lab - UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design - Berkeley, US; virtuaLAB and modLAB - Politecnico di Torino, ITA; Iceland fablabs organization) in the makerspace and educational environment, in order to understand the relation between them and between people involved in their activities. The practice of making design education will be presented with tangible case studies developed in Politecnico di Torino in collaboration with FabLab Torino.