The Master in Food Design and Innovation of Milan’s Scuola Politecnica di Design isquite unique in promoting growth and innovation in the Food & Beverage industry through a systemic approach having Design as its strategic driver.
Italy is considered as an international point of reference in many fields, including design, and food. Given today’s general hype around the aesthetics of food, its symbolism and its communicative power, the two have been fused together in a single concept, that of food design.
So it is no accident that Milan, the capital of design, was chosen as the seat of a new and distinctive international educational project aiming at stimulating innovation in the food industry under a holistic approach and according to design’s typical methodology.
We are talking about the Master in Food Design and Innovation promoted by SPD, Scuola Politecnica di Design, incollaboration with lULM University. The latter has long been aspiring to creating a new generation of managers and designers capable of combining marketing and communication skills with design’s sensitivity and project methodology in a field for which Italy is recognised for its absolute excellence: food.
"No design school has ever done anything like this: bringing together the entire food value-chain under a single strategic driver, design, to stimulate innovation in the agri-foodindustry” underlines Antonello Fusetti, founder of the Master and director of the Scuola Politecnica di Design. “Our school is unique”.
The faculty is composed of managers, marketing and communication professionals, designers, researchers, chefs, entrepreneurs and food-and-wine journalists.
The Master was born in 2015. Again, not a coincidence: at the time, Milan was the international capital of food on the occasion of Expo2015, and it's not a coincidence either to find, among those who inspired the project, the founder of food design himself, SPD alumni Martì Guixè as a prestigious member of the Master’s faculty (stay tuned for his interviewnext week).
Another element making this course unique is the long established collaboration of the SPD with PepsiCo, the firstmultinational in the industry to elevate design as the central element of its development strategy.
This collaboration translates into the opportunity for students of doing research work under the supervision of PepsiCo’s design centre, headed by Mauro Porcini.
The school also has a Food Design department that acts, across the various disciplines, as a training centre on food research and design in the agri-food industry.
The curriculum is made up of 11 modules, all taught in English, that provide students with the know how and the skills to design new foods, develop new concepts for bars and restaurants,invent new distribution formats, create new tools and fruition rituals, experiment with packaging and communication, and conceive strategies for food design tourism as a way to enhance local communities’ competitiveness.
“The whole world is interested in our Master” says SPD director Fusetti, “our students come from 20 different countries, and we are interested in exporting our model abroad. We had started talks with Shanghai’s East China Normal University, but the project was interrupted by the outbreak of the pandemic. We have great potential and we want to collaborate with companies worldwide. I’m also referring to home appliances and consumer electronics producers and retailers. In these fields,design thinking would help introduce a completely new and disruptive approach to the product and its in-store declination, which is the way forward to bring value and growth.”
