Rethinking cities and societies: what is Transdisciplinarity
In the introduction to her panel at the Biennial Conference Series of the Design Research Society, which took place in Bilbao, Spain, from June 25th to July 3rd 2022, Professor Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer of the Delft University of Technology said:
“The complexity and wickedness of today’s societal challenges cannot be adequately tackled from the sphere of individual disciplines.
Transdisciplinary research is claimed to be essential in tackling today’s complex societal challenges. [...] design relates to three different conceptions of transdisciplinarity: a multi-level disciplinary practice, a participatory practice, and a practice focused on complexity and social learning.”
Over the past 3 years, Italy, especially in light of the effects of the covid-19 pandemic, has witnessed a serious rethinking of cities and the way people live in them, on the level of government authorities. It is a national plan of unprecedented scale (PNRR), which means for the country the arrival of approximately 200 billion euros to be invested in improving infrastructure and services within a large number of cities and local communities.
In the wake of these new needs to be addressed, underscored also by Professor van der Bijl-Brouwer's words, IED has deployed its design know-how and history in the form of a Master of Arts in Transdisciplinary Design.
Here the framework of new educational program, which is an absolute novelty in the Italian university landscape, in the words of 3 of its faculty members:
“Transdisciplinary design is not a discipline nor a profession. It is an attitude, a way of thinking that takes the values and methodology of design and tries to bring together people from different backgrounds in order to reframe problems, even to the point of shaping new disciplines. Today design is reflecting on itself and transdisciplinarity is the name that we gave to design in this reflection.”
Riccardo Balbo, IED Academic Director
“From 2021 to 2025 in Italy we have to spend more than 2 houndreds billion euro in rethinking cities and industrial areas. We need really young and talented people to help local communities to invest in a very good manner this money. We need people who can mix mobility and social changes and can shape new ways of working and even new ideas of society.”
Paolo Verri, Urban Practitioner and Director of communications for the Italian Publishers Association
"Companies that produce mobility products interact with actors such as tech companies, data providers, regulatory bodies, who all together are writing new processes. It certainly is a mobility issue, but it cannot disregard how mobility applies to our cities. I'm thinking of a big international but all-italian project like the 2026 Winter Olympics that will be held between Milan and Cortina: that project will need a lot of thinking, about how the city of Milan will be transformed but it's also the first time that the city will be moving on two such different areas: the mountains and the city, so the whole theme of mobility will be central in the construction of this big event."
Paola Zini, IED Torino Director
If you are interested in learning more about the Master's program or in hearing the testimonials from the first graduates, take a look at the Youtube playlist: