Paola Trapani
Teaching activities

 

 

Foto Paola Trapani Paola Trapani, architect and PhD in Industrial Design, has a strong opinion of the importance of facing a broad array of subjects and ideas, and to develop a variety of experiences during the training period, in order to shape an open-minded approach from a designer perspective. This attitude drives her career since education, both in academic and professional fields, in reseraching a personal and original synthesis, crossing boundaries between design disciplines. She is adjunct professor at Università degli Studi di Milano, Department of Information and Communication, where she collaborates in research and courses involving cross-media platforms and virtual reality.
Since 2005 she collaborates with the research unit Design and Innovation for Sustainability (DIS) at the Department of Industrial Design, Arts, Communication and Fashion (INDACO), Politecnico di Milano. She runs her own practice in the field of hight-tech landscape (roof-top gardens and green walls). She has worked as Art Director, for cultural institutions and for a multinational corporation.
Her experience inspires her teaching methods, which encourage the students to assume an active learning attitude, aiming at developing those intellectual skills which will later enable them to analyse problems, conceive proper solutions and communicate those solutions to the clients.

.: Service design :.

A graduate course in Industrial design (100 hours)

The course encourages students to envision effective strategies in developing product-service systems (PSS) on a given theme. Solutions will emphasize emotional values and the reachness of users’ experience, promote sustainability and improve the relationship amon the actors. Basic requirement is the use of ICT solutions as platforms to empower people’s interaction and cooperation.
Syllabus

Student projects samples

.: Strategic design :.

A master workshop in Strategic design (25 hours)

The Workshop "Ethical/ethnical/fair design and business cases" aims at developing four different strategic scenarios for product, service and communication planning, addressed to SoFar/So-Near, an italian firm active in the field of fair design.

Student projects samples

.: Visual comunication :.

An undergraduate course in Computer science (48 hours)

The course spans over two units: the first one addressing Basic design principles (i.e. the Gestalt and color theories and their applications to visual communication); the second one dedicated to the definition of a corporate identity and brand standards manual.
Syllabus

Student projects samples

.: Multimedia systems :.

The course requires the translation and transposition of a narrative into an interactive multimedia system, integrating different languages: text, images, audio and video.
Syllabus for an undergraduate course in Computer science (48 hours)

Student projects samples

.: Virtual reality :.

An undergraduate course in Computer science (48 hours)

The subtitle could be... "everything but the dungeon"! The course aims at promoting Computer science students’ abilities in concept generation, design, visualization and rendering of innovative 3D spaces for Virtual Reality environments and video games. It spans over two units: the first one, focusing on Basic design principles (i.e. topological properties of the space, possible operations and transformation), requires individual assignements; the second one requires a collaborative group-project on an assigned theme.
Syllabus
Sample of the first module assignements

Samples of a sky-car city project


Sample of a zero-impact city project

 

July '09