Punkt. and the Wunderkammer of Ideas Seminar
In the context of the Wired Next Fest, and in keeping with Punkt.'s commitment to education programmes, we teamed up with Domus Academy and NABA for an inspiring day on the campus, reflecting on the future of design education from different perspectives: Wunderkammer of Ideas. The public seminar was staged with the aim of guiding and improving knowledge creation processes in the contemporary period.
The seminar was structured around one-to-one interactions between specialist guest speakers and students, where the students challenged the experts with questions on chosen topics. There were 12 sessions which covered topics ranging from science to writing, art to business, technology to design.
The featured specialists were: Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, physicist, Ph.D. from MIT and researcher at the University of Rome La Sapienza; Amnon Dekel, programmer, computer scientist, computer artist and psychologist; Clemens Weisshaar, German designer, co-founder of the Kram/Weisshaar studio in Munich and Stockholm; Giorgio De Mitri, Creative Director of Sartoria Comunicazione, a successful Modena-based creative agency; Dan Hill, managing director of Fabrica, author of the popular blog City of Sound; Slovakian designer Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny, who founded a studio in Rotterdam focused on exploring strategies in object design and construction; Renato Montagner, architect, who founded the multidisciplinary studio Change Design in 2002; Nikolaus Hirsch, architect, curator and director of Städelschule and Portikus Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; Roberto Paci Dalò, visual artist and composer; Matteo Pericoli, architect, illustrator and teacher who recently completed a Literary Architecture course at the Columbia University School of the Arts; Elisa Poli, architectural historian, who teaches at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ferrara and on the Master in Interior Design promoted by NABA, and Kuno Prey, the designer and lecturer who founded the new Faculty of Design and Art at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The introductory speakers were Alberto Bonisoli, Marc Ledermann, Petter Neby and Gianluigi Ricuperati.
The daylong Wunderkammer of Ideas event sparked off a lively debate which revealed a gap between how students live and learn in the 21st century. The question for the world of academe is how to create real value for students, which in turn means exploring how we measure success in a rapidly changing multi-media society. Maybe education needs to go back to basics and understand the true value of learning in order to produce knowledge and provide opportunities directly related to students' life goals. Rethinking our definition of success in a knowledge-based society could be an interesting place to start.
