Master’s Course in Design Management

In this new global setting and in a highly competitive context, companies are becoming entities ever-increasingly difficult to manage. Being ever more “systems” with complex needs, companies need to rely on in-house flexible profiles able to face this multifaceted reality and create interrelations within the whole organisation.

This professional profile has to be able to manage company project, from product to communication up to distribution aspects relying on a deep knowledge of the whole system. And design get the trait d’union, the critical tool of the decision-making process that reduces the risk of innovation as much as possible; it has a strategic function since it can integrate brand, market and users; it is the project that looks ahead, that sees and assesses its resources.

Aims

This Master’s course aims at training professional profiles having project skills and capacities to manage interdisciplinary complexities within the company-system.
Students will be provided with all the tools needed to understand company dynamics; their communication and creative skills will be developed; they will be taught the principles of economics and marketing strategies; their relational personal skills will be enhanced. Beside project and design culture, these are the values required for managing the company system.

The course targeted to those who already have some knowledge of design and wish to specialise in managerial dynamics and also to those who already have managerial qualification and wish to deepen their knowledge about design to be able to include it into the decision-making process.

Teaching programme

Company Area

• Business organisation (Staff-Line functions)
• Production process (production-logistics-supply-distribution)

Economics and Marketing Area

• Business Plan
• Basic Marketing

Management

• Design management
• Design system
• Innovation process management

Cultura del progetto

• Project Culture
• The Made-in-Italy System

Communication

• Brand Management
• Art Direction

Profession

• Human Resources Managemen
• Negotiation & PR

Teaching method

The teaching method is based on the Internet and in the “Master” section of the portal www.uninettunouniversity.net, the first portal of the world where teaching is delivered in 4 languages: Italian, English, French and Arabic.

The psycho-pedagogic model that is characterised by the shifto:

• From teacher’s central role to the student’s central role;
• From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation;
• From a passive and competitive learning to active and collaborative learning.

Students play an active role in their own learning process and can study whenever and wherever they prefer to. Along their training path, students are supported by an online tutoring system that facilitate their training and web-based communication path and that supplies them with the tools the tools to carry out their study of a specific subject successfully.

Online tutoring is organised in classes of students and is based on a advanced system of agenda that can acknowledge any individual student and therefore customise and get the tracking of all training activities and qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the each individual student’s learning progress.

How to study

The didactic activities on the Internet unfold in the Web-based macro-area, called the Didactic Cyberspace. In the Didactic Cyberspace the training and learning process takes place and access profiles are diversified through customized logins and passwords based on the three different roles played by the actors of the learning process: Professors, Tutors and Students. These three categories of users can access the same information related to each course. In particular the Professors and Tutors can edit or replace training materials and add new ones for the whole course delivery period, whereas the student has at his disposal an area where he can enter data, information and personal notes.
The student can access:

• the Page of the Appointed Teaching Professor;
• the Page of the Tuto.

On these pages there are the Learning Environments where is possible to access:

Didactic Materialswhich represent the course contents: digitized video lessons including bookmarks allowing for hypertextual and multimedia linking to books, selected bibliographical references, texts of the exercises, lists of selected websites. The system of dynamic bookmarks gives the Internet-based videolessons a hypertextual character allowing different levels of navigation: from one lesson to the other one, among subjects of a single lesson, between the materials referring to the same subject.

• Distance Tutoring.
he students enrolled in the Master’s course will be assisted in every step of their study path by Telematic Professors-Tutors. The Telematic Professor-Tutor, represents a guide as well as a constant presence along the Learning Process. The distance Tutoring activities may be carried out in two ways:

• in a synchronic manner, by using chats, videochats, video and audio-conferencing, implemented in the Didactic Cyberspace, but also the three-dimensional classroom created on the UTIU Island of knowledge on Second Life.
• in a diachronic manner, through tools such as e-mail and discussion forums on the Internet. The discussion forums, related to the topics of a given teaching subject, enable to enlarge dialogue and trigger a collaborative learning and give the opportunity for autonomous thinking on the issue being discussed and on the study activities carried on.

• The virtual classroom in UNINETTUNO Island of Knowledge on Second Life
On UNINETTUNO (International Telematic University) Island of Knowledge we realised a 3D Auditorium devoted to the Master’s course. In this environment the students and professors/tutors’ avatars interact in the three-dimensional world of UNINETTUNO by their voice. Practice work, assessment tests and videoconferences with the protagonists of the European Union attending through their avatars are carried out, as well as real-time practice activities guided by the professors/tutors’ avatars.

In the virtual classroom of Second Life on the UNINETTUNO Island of Knowledge the students and the professors/tutors teach and learn in a collaborative and cooperative way; they build and share knowledge with people belonging to different political, cultural and religious settings, they dialogue, cultural differences are confronted, socialization processes are implemented as well as the creation of new knowledge.