Teaching Design & Engineering Students how to handle the Form Giving issue

This paper goes over an educational activity held at the Design Faculty of Politecnico di Milano in the DesignE such emphasis, if from one side teaches students to master all the feasibility aspects, on the other one it is likely to override the product’s formal aspects. Indeed, being these last aspects the most subjective, they are also the most difficult to teach and to master: this is the reason why DesignE regarding the product composition, the three concepts proposed by Dieter Mankau of additive, integrative and integral were introduced to the students. After the analysis, students were asked to apply the character of the analyzed product to a new one. In other words the final goal of the exercise was to generate a new form giving it the same character of the analyzed product.

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