Mindplay

If there is something that I can barely tolerate, is waiting without really knowing how long. It’s been quite a month spent wondering, and wandering, and figuring out the very next steps to take after summertime. Truth be told, I was pretty much convinced that I would have passed the admission test to attend the Masters program but, you know, you always need to be prepared to pick up your jaw up off the floor and hold still your B-plan for immediate action. Fortunately this is not been the case, and today I received the official congratulations for my final score coming from the Master in Strategic Design coordinator, welcoming me on board wholeheartedly.

The admission test concerned topics related to Product Service Systems, geared to measure the candidate’s vision, sensitivity to signs of innovation and the overall ability to formulate solutions. I really don’t know if they were looking for people with my academic preparation, or if they tailored the test based on my specific profile. The fact is that, with a major in sociology of culture under my belt, they were some pretty straightforward questions to answer, even if open enough to lead the casual speedy typer to all sorts of problems.

Milano, I’m coming!

July 2011 Update: I keep receiving various contact requests on Facebook, asking for a thorough appraisal of the Masters courses, informations about the exam pattern, a suggested syllabus, tips and tricks… Unfortunately, there is not much that I can say about it, as it is unlikely I am going to even try to detect a format out of a single test. Good luck!

Everyone’s talking about the late 2000’s recession these days. I come up speaking about actual financial uncertainties pretty frequently with managers and young professionals, all of them expressing general disappointment and complaining about the overall direction in which postmodernism is actually developing. At the end of each conversation an agreement is reached, which can be summed up in that well-worn sentence from Star Trek: “it’s life, Jim, but not as we know it”.

As a longtime creative manager, I am very much concerned about economic issues, business development and, of course, the role of design in modern organizations, because of the problematic relations set between technological innovation, cultural evolution and the environment. Since design is the periodic reconstruction of accepted ideas, roles and procedures that take place in human praxis, it’s by far the most important competitive advantage that any successful company should foster.
It’s been a long time since the establishment of Sullivan’s principle, form follows function, which has been celebrated by industrial culture in various forms, starting from the Bauhaus movement to the relatively recent improvements set by a number of slightly different concurrent engineering approaches. However, the incremental progress that these trends determined fades in comparison to the paradigm shift in design culture that we are witnessing today.

As revealed by a growing body of sociological knowledge¹, human beings do not respond to the immanent properties of objects in the physical world, but to their cultural meanings, the relations people² establish with their peers by means of real stuff. Of course, this perspective doesn’t pop out by chance, and is based on very solid foundations indeed, namely the increased symbolic complexity of human interactions, globalization and technological innovation. However, despite some pretty logical connections, it radically breaks with functionalist traditions in design, rendering some common and widely accepted opinions obsolete.
Be that as it may, with design (1) meaning making sense of things and (2) being the pivotal competitive advantage for any successful business, many scholarly disciplines, that operate at the intersection of business, technology and social life, are actually trespassing each other boundaries, and blazing trails into territories previously claimed mainly by designers.

I spent most of the summer time trying figuring out what to do next, because I had a feeling that, as a professional, I was loosing some grip on the reality of business. I had to make a point of what is actually happening in the market, and then develop a strategy to get back on track. After all this musings, I got persuaded by the idea that economic crisis is not originated by general postmodern uncertainties, the cultural chaos, whatever… The widespread inability to distinguish the forest for the trees at a business management level is probably more the case; the obsession with market competition within unquestioned market boundaries; the futile effort to search for stability in the wrong places, that is on the surfaces of tangible artifacts that no longer fit traditional conceptions.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans

So, while industries were making their very best to fulfill their beautiful plans for steady growth and dreaming of a global market coverage for their products and services, human needs were just getting more and more ethereal, informational and emotionally compelling. At the same time, new heterarchical social constructions and information networks, made possible by the widespread adoption of the internet, are radically undermining traditional social hierarchies and the linear communication model betrayed by mass media³, encouraging a new kind of personal involvement in technology, enabling alternative conceptions of reality, and creating and reproducing diverse practices in everyday life.
In such a context, contemporary industries need to reorient their core businesses, moving from shaping the appearance of concrete products, that they are today equally well suited manufacturing, to conceptualizing artifacts, both material and social, that have a chance of meaning something to their users, their interconnected communities, and that are able to support society at large, which is in the process of reconstructing itself in unprecedented ways and at warp speed.

Change direction

After some now compulsory googling, I finally came up with a pretty relevant academic program that promises to be a nearly perfect gym for my convoluted inquiry: the Master in Strategic Design held in Polytechnic of Milan, one of the worldwide most respected and well renowned universities in the fields of engineering, technology, management and design. You can find more detailed informations about it on the dedicated website but, at the time of writing, I collected enough informations to assert that they’re going to cover the very same ground that I’m writing about in this post (so I’m flinging with the idea of attending this fifteen months full time course). I will sit my admission exam before the end of August and I really hope they will find me an ideal candidate for such an exclusive international masters program. I’m aware that, in order to successfully attend this program, some difficult decisions have to be taken: quit my job and go living in a brand new city, for example…

Anyway, I believe the time is perfect for me to engage in such a challenge at the forefront of academic research and expertise. I have a solid preparation and a substantial work experience to make me get the most out of this program. I’ll keep you posted.