Design Acculturation and Design Didactics

This paper is based on the investigation of specializing and professionalizing training experiences analyzed by the author, and a case study about the origin of a "connection" between acculturation, skills improvement and the evolution of the design profession. The main topics covered by the discussion concern the expansion and growth of the design discipline on the one hand, and on the other hand the issue of tools and methods of a training that needs to keep up with the times and with the change of project technologies , but still following and supporting the same continuous extension of the limits of the discipline. It is precisely the issue of the criticality and complexity of the limits that this paper intends to explain with a perspective that arises from the education users and is detected through their learning requests, their identification of the main topics for specialization and their ability to understand the relationship between the topics of a constantly evolving discipline and the professional skills to be acquired and proposed on the market of intellectual professions. Each school, which generates an offer aimed at the implementation of skills and cultural depth, acts as a connector between limit knowledge and its application in a professional context in which designers are increasingly "integrators" and fewer individual authors. This position has been highlighting for some time the complexity of offering educational quality in the fluidity of the context and we can generally see today the diffusion of digital solution and for the digital, with some experimentation about distance learning. However, the learning-by-doing method remains widespread, although perhaps challenged by the substantial change in the project discipline. The pandemic has introduced constraints that have forced methods and approaches to design teaching, creating significant opportunities for experimentation, which we are going to discuss