Re: IVREA

Dave, you've mostly got the story right (and you're right about  
support for interaction design outside of the US), but I want to  
clarify a few things, and say a few other things. I was an associate  
professor at Ivrea, and Mark Vanderbeeken did a good job of telling  
the story as it was. Telecom Italia funded both Domus and Interaction- 
Ivrea. They had made a five-year commitment to Ivrea, which got the  
school started, and saw three classes of students graduate with  
masters degrees in interaction design, resident in Ivrea. They then  
reconsidered funding two different institutions (they hadn't been the  
original funder of the school, and had come into Interaction-Ivrea  
after a series of mergers). It wasn't an enormous surprise. I don't  
think that I'd say that nothing has change -- a lot has, but the  
attitude of the Milan unit is very true to IDII. It's just what  
happens after this year that's the question, because it seems highly  
unlikely it will be the same.

The current class in Milan is its own unit within Domus, and go under  
the name Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan. Mark mentioned  
the new website for the Milan unit, and I think it gives great  
insight into the students, their work and personalities: http:// 
milano.interaction-ivrea.it

Interaction-Ivrea was a very unusual and special place. In part, its  
location (which Gillian Crampton-Smith, the former director of the  
school, referred to as a "monastery and an airport") at the base of  
the Italian Alps, in a small town, made the group of people tighter  
than in most academic settings. And the history of Ivrea, a socialist  
company town in decline from its heyday as a brilliant design and  
cultural center for Olivetti, provided an interesting backdrop. We  
lived and worked in masterpieces of Italian modernist architecture  
(though Marc Rettig said that my love for the residence, Talponia,  
was really Stockholm syndrome ... anyone who has visited Ivrea and  
seen Talponia may understand this tension).

One of the years I was teaching, the students came from 22 different  
countries -- I found that you could assume nothing about anyone's  
background (as evidenced in an Applied Dreams workshop I taught, in a  
side conversation about obituaries and funerals: everyone in the  
workshop was from a different country, every country handled  
obituaries differently, and we all found the different ways of  
announcing deaths strange). Excellent visitors came through, and  
tight working relationships with companies and organizations that  
highly valued design offered the opportunity to work on innovative  
projects. Thesis work was thought-provoking, and represented the  
value that a masters program can bring that working in the field does  
not: an opportunity to be highly creative without a direct and  
continual focus on the bottom line. The students did prescient,  
exciting work that pushes the boundaries of what most consider to be  
interaction design: their work involved interactive environments,  
physical computing, connected communities, service design, mobile  
technology, wearables, site installations, and personal technology,  
to name a very few.

The final group of second-year students, and the group of faculty and  
staff (please note that there are excellent additions to the faculty  
-- it's not just a subset of the previous group), are outstanding  
torch bearers of the Interaction-Ivrea culture. They've been very  
strong through this transition, and have stayed together as a very  
close-knit group. They're doing some of my favorite work yet. In  
following school years, I'm not certain that Domus' interaction  
design group will turn out the same kind of interaction designers.  
The program is larger. It's not as likely to be so close-knit. And  
most importantly, the Domus program is not a two-year masters with a  
thesis, one of the things Gillian felt was most important with the  
program (she mentions this in her June 2005 graduation speech).

IDII was a strange and wonderful place. It is sad it won't continue  
the way it was, but anyone who was there, from the most resident of  
professors and students, to the most transient of visitors, probably  
got a feel for that. And as everyone spreads out into the world,  
there's likely an Ivrean in most countries you visit.

Cheers,
Molly


On Feb 19, 2006, at 10:03 AM, Dave Heller wrote:

> Ivrea has been taken over by the Domus Institute in Milan and  
> turned into
> its Interaction Design program there. Many of the faculty have  
> remained on.
> So from what I can tell things are pretty OK, and only the altitude  
> has
> changed. ;) (yes that is a hyperbole).
>
> But in general the european community has shown a strong commitment  
> to IxD.
> there are more IxD programs in Europe than in the US by far. (I'm not
> including HCI and InfoSys programs as being equal to a design  
> school IxD
> program). Italy, Holland, Sweden, UK, and others all have  
> universities or
> design schools with strong IxD components. Most of these programs  
> are NOT
> tied to a single corporate sponsor the way that Ivrea was, which I  
> believe
> is a longer term and more sustainable arrangement. In the US CMU still
> remains the main program setting the standard for IxD, but  
> Savannah, ID/IIT,
> and RISD to name a few are also picking up the charge.
>
> I also wouldn't want to dismiss the host of Industrial Design  
> programs that
> are starting to include IxD as a main part of their cirriculum.  
> This seems
> to be the strong tendency within the E. Asian and S. Asian  
> educationality
> community.
>
> -- dave
>
> On 2/18/06, Bob Jacobson <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>  A colleague told me that Olivetti has withdrawn its support for
>> Interaction
>> Design Institute-IVREA.  Is this true?  If so, what are the  
>> consequences
>> for
>> IVREA and the implications for our field?
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> __________________________________________________________
>>
>>        Robert Jacobson, Ph.D. * Bluefire Consulting
>>                Technology Trends + Meanings
>> 2820 Third Street #4, Santa Monica, California 90405 USA
>>     Email:  [email protected] * Phone:  +1-650-670-9082
>>              Skype: bob.jacobson (with a "dot")
>>
>>                    Designing experience.
>> "Total Experience," http://corante.com/totalexperience/
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>
> --
> David Heller
> E: dheller (at) gmail (dot) com
> W: www (dot) synapticburn (dot) com
>
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PURPOSE OF THE LIST:  The objective of AIGA Experience Design is to build an interdisciplinary community of professionals who design for a world in which experiences are increasingly digital and connected. This list has been established as a forum for the exchange of information among community members.

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MORE INFORMATION: http://experiencedesign.aiga.org
 
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