IDX – International Design Experience

Every internationalization project begins with a question.
In our case, the question was deceptively simple:

how can Italy’s cultural, design, and creative heritage continue to generate innovation in an increasingly interconnected
and complex world, shaped by profound social, economic, and cultural transformations?

It was from this reflection that the project Creative Competencies for Social Change – Tradition and Future of the Made in Italy Brand took shape, within the framework of the initiatives supported by Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) to strengthen the international dimension of the Higher Education Institutions in Art, Music, and Dance (AFAM). Led by ISIA Roma Design alongside ISIA Firenze, ISIA Faenza, ISIA Pescara, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania, and the Saint Louis College of Music, the two-year project was developed through an extensive network of universities, cultural institutions, museums, and international research centers, with a particular focus on Latin America. From the outset, the project was conceived as something more than a conventional academic cooperation initiative or an international mobility programme. Its objectives were broader: to strengthen the international capacity of AFAM institutions; to develop shared lines of research; to foster the mobility of students, faculty, and researchers; to enhance Italian cultural heritage through a contemporary and comparative perspective; and, ultimately, to generate educational and cultural innovation through workshops, courses, conferences, exhibitions, publications, and design experimentation. At the heart of the programme, however, lay a specific methodological choice: to adopt Systemic Design as both the interpretative framework and the operational approach underpinning the entire project.