The role of design in the process of innovation between industry, creativity and culture: an educational challenge

Investing in design to improve the world - in the community, in citizens, but also in the organizational and entrepreneurial forms that produce goods and services - represents an important challenge. It is a challenge that is closely associated with the ability to imagine the future of design education and of education thanks to the contribution of design. This reflection is accompanied by a profound change in the role of the designer: in the last thirty years, the design professional has moved from being an actor of industrial and post-industrial organizations to being a node of a system that exists outside of the traditional company. The contemporary designer plays an individual, complex, dynamic, relational and operational role within a sphere of mediation between market and production, which takes the name of cultural and creative industry. In Italy, even more than in other countries, the historical dimension of companies facilitates this transition, by associating the ongoing process with the made in Italy tradition. To represent this change, this paper relates the work done by the Bologna agency youtool.it, a business idea born in 2010, which has been designing, developing and managing the Bologna Design Week (BDW) event. This small, private organization specialized in communication, design and graphics, has worked, from its very beginning, in an interdisciplinary way, producing a creative platform to facilitate the meeting between designers and local companies. Through an entirely bottom-up process, BDW has brought the relationship between the local creative class and the regional economic system to a concrete dimension, formalizing the creation of a veritable design system. By networking universities, creative studios, industries, SMEs and distributors, this agency promotes the creativity of a region and works so that a new design culture enters the enterprises and generates new production models and new economies. The case study therefore represents a design process that radically impacts on future society.