Creating a Participatory Design Tools: Didactic Experience

The aim of this paper is to describe the didactic experimentation conducted on the involvement of the user in the design process at the Politecnico of Milan during the Final Synthesis Design Studio course and to document the interesting results of this experience. For students it is strategically important to understand the scenarios of the corporate reality they are about to fit in. The didactic choice requires the introduction of tools created and adopted by important design studios and research groups as well as practical experimentation through short exercises of the simplest approaches. The classroom workshop allowed the students to build up their own work instruments; a set of tools meant to support and stimulate the brainstorm phase. The material assembled during the experimentation was devoted to knowledge elicitation and creativity techniques. The achieved results have very interesting implications for both education and training