Polito Studio, a Collaborative Experiment Between Academia and Practice

In an increasingly complex world, the design disciplines often remain tied to rigid modes of practice. Among these is the growing weakness of the collaboration between academic and professional environments, which instead the scientific literature indicates as a potential ground for innovation due to their complementary nature and the different types of expertise they nurture (Amin and Roberts in Res Policy 37:353–369, 2008). How could we reframe and rethink architectural design to strengthen the relationship between academia and professional practice? How could this interaction innovate the practice and the architecture discipline in a global perspective —in the pursuit of the values expressed by SDGs 8 (“decent work and economic growth”) and 11 (“sustainable cities and communities”)? In specific geographical and regulatory contexts, professional and aca- demic institutions find wide spaces for collaboration (University Design Institutes in China, PennPraxis at the University of Pennsylvania, etc.). Against this background, the project Polito Studio aims to reframe existing institutional structures and define a platform for collaboration-in-practice projects between the academic and professional spheres. Such a platform is constructed through successive forms of “putting into practice” (Barbera and Parisi, Innovatori sociali, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2019) that allow to define, in the running, objectives, tools, and actions. The project intends to create a horizontal platform where a newly formed group of practitioners work together at a transnational scale, “perforating” international markets most commonly dominated by large global firms, through professional expertise combined with scientific research, and modes of labour and care that are more easily found at the small scale of practice.