Strategic Design (Specializing Master)

The Specializing Master in Strategic Design. Building new businesses and strategies through design, is a 1st Level Specializing Master of Politecnico di Milano, designed and run by POLI.design, founded by Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with MIP, the Politecnico di Milano Graduate School of Business.

The Specializing Master is structured in theoretical modules, projects and laboratories. The Master concludes with a curricular internship lasting 500 hours.

The Specializing Master is completely in English.

Strategic Design is a design activity that concerns the Product Service System, i.e. the integrated body of products, services and communication strategies that either an actor or a network of actors (companies, institutions, non profit organizations, etc.) generate and develop to to create value. It is often claimed that technological innovation, cultural and economical globalization, and the transition to environmental sustainability generate problems and opportunities. It is also repeatedly stated that the possibility to avoid the former and to exploit the latter requires the development of three core skills: visioning, sensing innovation, creating solutions embedded in new business models. It calls for the ability to design products and services whose success today anticipates what will be, or may have to be, the norm of tomorrow.

The social demand for a new generation of products and services, coherent with current socio-cultural transformations, and their sustainable development becomes an opportunity for companies able to operate in the context of this new design mindset. This unique meeting of design and company strategy: strategic design.

Goals

The programme aims to build the foundations of a specific and expert competence relating to the issues surrounding strategic design and to innovation and design of the product-system. The Specializing Master aims to produce experts and consultants capable of carrying out a design and management role in the innovation process of the product-system. In particular, the programme proposes training on integration of product, services and communication components and developing specific skills aimed at improving the overall process quality (that is, production methods and contexts) and that of the results (that is, that of the actual and perceived quality) that set the cultural identity characteristics, sensoriality a sustainability of the designed solutions.

The objective is therefore to instil in participants a design capacity (problem setting and problem solving), an ability to envisage and generate ideas, produce and communicate images, initiative in terms of being able to identify the methods, resources and partners to reach a pre-established objective, an aptitude for managing complexity by integrating resources and actors in an innovative design process and, in turn, knowing how to integrate with them, vision as an ability to select information, an ability to identify trends, build a personal point of view and produce scenarios, acquire the tools needed to understand and recognise the “range of possibilities” within which to operate and the related innovative factors; acquire the skills needed to design and manage innovation of the various product-system components; acquire multimedia tools to present personal ideas and designs with the help of various communication support; develop and improve the skills to take on and innovate the intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the cultural identity of product systems.

The programme aims to build the foundations of a specific and expert competence relating to the issues surrounding strategic design and to innovation and design of the product-system.

Job description

The placement identifies two main macro-professional profiles: “innovation and design specialists” (marketing directors, R&D managers, industrial designers and product engineers, services and multimedia solutions designers) and “integrators of innovative and design processes” (design managers, design directors, project managers, product managers, retail managers, brand managers, consultants for product-system innovation).

Final assesment

At the end of the programme, once the final examination has been passed, the 1st level Specializing Master Strategic Design. Building new businesses and strategies through design diploma will be issued, with the related achievement of 61 CFU/ECTS.

The Specializing Master is reserved to candidates with a university Diploma or a Bachelor or a Master of Science in engineering, architecture, industrial design, economics, social and human sciences, that have gained a certain degree of work experience and who intend on enriching their professional careers by working on the border between the design and management fields.