Head of Course: Prof. Matteo Ingaramo
The Master Program in Design and Engineering seeks to train a design figure that integrates the culture of Design with a technical-engineering culture: one that is able to manage product designing and development from an expressive and material point of view, but also with all its technical and operational implications for the management of production processes; ultimately, one that is able to produce a complete Design Plan: from product concept, through the final working design, to the drawing up of all the documentation required to start the production process; one particularly skilled in selecting materials and well-versed in design methodology in a virtual environment, and in the impacts on design of the technological aspects of production systems.
The aim of co-operation between the three disciplinary areas, Design (School of Design), Mechanical Engineering (School of Industrial Engineering) and Materials Engineering (School of Industrial Process Engineering), in the training project is to provide specialised training in three fundamental areas:
Design, Process and Industrial Production
enables course participants to acquire the tools and methods needed to manage the value chain in those aspects that concern industrial research and innovation, product life-cycle and associated processes. In particular, it supplies the methods and tools necessary to prepare students for integrated product-process designing, and for a correct understanding and management of the design, planning and control stages in the processes that uphold the finished product life-cycle, and of their components (transformation technologies, machines and systems, controls).
The following are basic themes:
technological research for innovation,
the integration of product design and process design,
design techniques for X,
process designing and production in distributed contexts,
designing and managing product life cycles and their associated processes,
feedback production,
the integration of processes with the systems behind them,
system management from an evolutionary point of view,
continual improvement of technology,
quality management:
Materials Design
confers specific knowledge and operational skills in the area of materials, surfaces and their processing technology. It integrates engineering culture with design through a deeper and more aware understanding of the relationships between structure and properties, whether physical-mechanical and functional, or sensorial, perceptive and emotional. Indeed, the study and design of potential new applications, including how they behave in action, is one of the basic elements in developing a pleasing product. To develop one that is at the same time attractive, practical and functional, we need to understand and govern the interaction between material, context and use quality of products.
Representing and prototyping
provides the methods and tools needed for designing and creating digital prototypes, meaning simulating real objects of Industrial Design, whether products or interiors, in all aspects (of form, function and structure). Basic areas are three dimensional modelling in general, and the methodology and techniques of reverse modelling and virtual prototyping: learning 3D modelling techniques as tools of design; learning virtual visualisation techniques as tools for perceptive, numerical and functional simulation; learning acquisition techniques for 3D data in shape and colour as tools for retroaction.
Didactics
The course aims to build a theoretical base through up-front teaching on which to apply, in laboratory sessions, creative design and product development methodology to current design issues of topical interest as regards technology, process and use.
Since students come from various Bachelor degree programs, it is necessary to organise fundamental courses of teaching in the first year to bring their knowledge of Industrial Design and Engineering to a similar level.
In the second year, up-front teaching is orientated towards the acquisition of specific technical knowledge for the development of the final working design, and to furthering design culture (course options and humanities).
There are Design laboratories in both years of the Master program for the application of what is learned in the theory lessons and, where possible, to integrate industrial Design and Engineering.
The tendency towards laboratory teaching in the course is an underlying principle of the agreement between the Schools involved in the Master Program.
