Thematic Framework
The discussion developed from the awareness that the new institutional and legislative context—and even more so the socio-economic and technological one—makes it urgent to revise the overall structure of PhDs at the national level, reflecting on what has been done, on current issues, and on future prospects.
The transition from a PhD as a place to verify the ability to conduct disciplinary research and start an academic career to a PhD as a moment of training for targeted research, open and connected to the demands of businesses, requires some choices: becoming a driving force for the creation of incubators, start-ups, and innovation projects; connecting through co-financing from businesses (industrial doctorates) to the productive world; imagining open professional profiles; rooting our doctorates in their territorial context. At the same time, internationalization has become an “obligatory” perspective, to be pursued by establishing international networks with foreign training programs, recognizing international qualifications, and exchanging highly qualified faculty.
The discussion also focused on the risks of this approach: the routinization of intellectual work, constrained to assigned topics or contingencies far from high-profile research; the reduction of individual research freedom; the impoverishment of disciplines.
In addition to these issues are the reductions and “pairings” to which the law has forced our courses (except for the Polytechnic University of Milan). From this perspective, some themes have emerged: transversality, contamination, interdisciplinarity, peculiar characteristics of design, are today further encouraged by often forced cohabitations in container doctorates, with the risk of further loss of identity. Therefore, a first commitment is on the one hand to make the disciplinary status of design increasingly clear and explicit, without rigidifying its boundaries but characterizing its specificities, while on the other hand promoting cooperation in the design research process with other knowledge.
Research activities must be adequately supported by a qualified training proposal, rethinking it with a national perspective, both “horizontally” among doctorates (e.g., identifying common paths across multiple locations), and “vertically,” imagining third-level training as part of a system of communicating vessels between the different levels of educational offerings, with particular attention to the role of master’s degrees. Much attention must be paid to promoting research even in the “weaker” situations, and training paths and consortia among multiple universities must be hypothesized.

Objective 01
Bringing Critical Thinking and Theories Back to the Center of Doctoral Research
Economic crisis, institutional changes, and the shift of the center of gravity of doctoral, post-doctoral, and European research towards applied research risk confining design to an instrumental and service role. Therefore, the culture of design as a whole must recover critical thinking (free and unprejudiced reflection on its operations) and the theoretical dimension (the autonomous and original elaboration of interpretative frameworks in which to place its operations).

Action 01
The evident shift of the center of gravity of doctoral, post-doctoral, and European research towards applied research—in which design can play an important role due to its characteristics of mediating technologies towards the user and which must be pursued decisively for the evident economic and social benefits that may result—risks confining design to an instrumental and service role. On the contrary, the current moment increasingly demands overcoming a concept of “narrow professionalism” limited to routine and operational skills, in favor of an “expanded professionalism,” which interprets and guides the profound changes underway.
To do this, the culture of design as a whole must recover critical thinking (free and unprejudiced reflection on its operations) and the theoretical dimension (the elaboration of interpretative frameworks in which to place its operations). In recent years, excessive acquiescence to the idea that design is an open, flexible, all-encompassing field has led to broad but diluted visions of the idea of design and has paved the way for the incursion of numerous other disciplines (engineering, management engineering and marketing, architecture, etc.) that now claim their space.

A conference will be organized on these topics, to be held in Venice in February 2016.
On that occasion, the second edition of “Design Matters,” the meeting of national design doctorates coordinated by the doctoral students themselves, will be held in parallel, where they will compare the results of their research and especially reflect on their research. This year’s meeting will have the slogan: “Doing Research in Design,” to which a subtitle will be found based on the themes proposed in the call.
The primary objective will be the publication of the materials from the two meetings.
Inter-university working groups will develop the thematic proposals for the two events for the call (September 2015) and will establish deadlines for the completion of the works and the publication.