A series of online workshops for design students on the themes of sustainability.
“Possible Futures for our Planet”, a series of online workshops for design students on the themes of sustainability promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in London in collaboration with Nesta Italia, took place between January and April last, with the aim of creating synergies between design students based in Italy and England, to imagine and develop practical proposals and solutions to current problems that risk compromising the future of new generations, starting from climate change and its impact on our everyday life.
The three online workshops, each dedicated to a specific theme – car design and mobility, tourism and urban regeneration in the Mediterranean area, future of the city – have been organised in partnership with IAAD- Istituto d’Arte Applicata e Design (Turin and Bologna), Abadir (Catania), Royal College of Art (London).
The results are now shared in a final report describing the different steps of the project as well as ideas, visions and prototypes produced by the collaboration between the students, teachers and workshops’ facilitators.
The report has highlighted the importance of the activities performed during this series of workshops, aimed at connecting people across nations and across culture. The students involved have come together in small groups and developed innovative ideas on the future of mobility, the future of tourism and the future of cities. In particular, each workshop consisted of three phases. After the current problematics and the future challenges our societies may face with regards to the chosen themes were exposed, tested solutions to tackle those issues were considered. Thus, subsequently, the students proposed new, innovative ideas and solutions that could be part of radical strategies for the transition towards a sustainable future. Despite the heterogeneity of the activities, four principles were always pinpointed: the beauty of diversity, the promotion of inclusion, the need of collaboration for strategic decisions, and the importance of a citizen-centric approach. Indeed, the idea of maintaining a common framework of values was at the heart of this project, since the possibility of tackling today’s social dilemmas following precise steps is key in imagining an inclusive and sustainable development of our society. In doing so, this project has achieved three goals. First of all, it has promoted a culture of sustainability highlighting the importance of imagining diverse, healthy and democratic communities. Secondly, it has stimulated practices of deliberation and collaboration between young people, coming from different nations and cultures, encouraging them to adopt an inclusive forward-looking perspective. Finally, it has helped students to understand how to harness the best ideas, information and insight to address complex issues through collective intelligence. In this way, students were able to imagine ways to tackle future social challenges using design-thinking strategies in order to achieve a solution with a shared value for all.