Transdisciplinary Design - IED Turin

If we truly want to create a meaningful future for mobility, we need to transcend the traditional  borders between disciplines to create a transdisciplinary and exciting approach of mobility.

The role of mobility in our lives can hardly be overestimated, and it is crystal clear that its importance and challenges are only rising. A growing amount of vehicles and changing behaviours put immense stress on our infrastructures, mobility planners rethink how to move in our cities, parcel delivery thrives as never before, new mobility services are mushrooming the app stores, and lawmakers struggle to embed the accelerating technologic opportunities into slow moving policies. During the two years of the Master of Arts you will become part of IED’s transdisciplinary mobility studio, approaching the topic from every possible angle.

The first year is all about hands-on exploring: we kick off by setting the mobility field and delve into a broad range of interesting tools and methods to study and work within it. The classes are a vibrant mix of theory and practice in which we learn from experts in the field and put everything to the test by doing and experimenting. Then the programme offers a diverse range of students access to aunique approach to the development of design as a holistic and strategic tool for the identification and interrogation of complex problems in the domain of mobility. Students will have the chance to work on live challenges using cities as crucibles for finding and defining complex problems which cannot be addressed, resolved or solved through one discipline alone.

Driving beyond the automobile, this course will inspire students from around the world to work together on key challenges made real through the ‘city-crucible’ approach, that grounds design exploration in live problems found in cities today. This programme will initiate a unique and high-level network of expertise ranging across a wide field of disciplines, from interaction design to service design; and from autonomous systems design through big data visualization to product and environmental design. Fields outside design will be proactively encouraged, for example, from sociology, change management and organisational strategy. The city of Turin, which lies at the heart of the automotive industries, is a natural platform for connecting and combining new forms of expertise and knowledge to discover, define, develop and deliver new outcomes in the field of future mobility during a time of transition.