A journey in Service Design education

Last Thursday, November 9, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Specializing Master in Service Design by POLI.design – Politecnico di Milano. The event, held in Polifactory, has been an opportunity to meet again the Master’s community: alumni from past editions, faculty members, partner and former partner organizations, and academics, professionals, and experts in the field. It’s also been an occasion of reflection, to stop for a moment and look back to what happened to design education, service design practice, and the Master itself in the last decade. Finally, it’s been a chance to present “Nurturing Service Designers“, the report on the 10 years of the Master, edited by the Master Board.

The event, titled “A journey in Service Design education“, was structured in four sessions. In the first session, Beatrice Villari (Co-director of the Master) opened the event with retrospectives and perspectives on the Master, and a reflection on the past 10 years of service design research and practice through Politecnico di Milano’s perspective. The second part saw Francesca Foglieni (Senior Advisor of the Master) focusing on the students’ profiles – from data also shown in the report – before and after the Master, and the timeline of the Master’s teachings in relation to the evolution of the discipline. Francesca also presented the new cluster of executive courses in Service Design & Innovation by POLI.design; Daniela Sangiorgi (Coordinator of the master’s degree course in Product Service System Design) followed and extended the discussion to the worldwide service design MSc courses and their alumni – as the first findings of an ongoing research – linking them to the variations between the different markets. The third session saw Cabirio Cautela (CEO of POLI.design) and Stefano Maffei (Director of the Master) discussing the near-future training challenges within the design field and the relationship with – and between – market and society. The last part was an open discussion with the audience, in which participants brought their experiences and points of view on the emerging themes and methods that will characterize the future of service design education and training.

A special thanks to our community: the students and the alumni of the past 10 editions of the Master, the faculty members, and all the partner and former partner organizations and institutions; POLI.design, Polifactory, the Department of Design, and the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano; all the people who worked with us and supported us through the past 10 years.

Stay tuned: “Nurturing Service Designers“, the report on the 10 years of the Master, will be published soon!