Planning Culture, Progettare Cultura in Italian, trains professionals whose expertise will enable them to plan cultural events, such as exhibitions, installations, and public art projects, with a special eye to the visual arts, multimedia, and their relationship to the geographic area. Every cultural project is a complex system involving a series of players who take part in staging it: from the curator to the project manager, from the designer to those who take care of communication, fundraising and sponsorship, as well as the organizations hosting the project. Interaction and discussion among the various professionals who work together, each starting from a particular set of skills and point of view, help lend meaning and form to the cultural project.
Aims
One of the Specializing Master main goals is to teach how to plan and choreograph the moves needed to build a coordinated cultural event that can use today’s language to explain complex disciplines and values, reaching out to a broad audience. In order for that to occur, the project requires both a solid grounding in the humanities to frame it in its historical and conceptual itinerary, which is the province of the faculty from the Università Cattolica Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia (School of Literature and Philosophy), and the design input that gives sensory shape to the audience’s experience of the installation, which is brought by the faculty from the Politecnico di Milano Design School.
Training is based on continuous dialogue with industry professionals and on constant practice to transmit the skills needed to build a cultural project. During the Master methods and tools for the design and project management intertwine, to provide updated models of creation and management of cultural interventions.
The curriculum is made up of 432 classroom hours (including 256 course hours, 96 hours of seminar, and 80 hours of project work, i.e. supervised design tasks), 300 hours of fieldwork internship, and 768 hours of independent study and preparation for the final design project, in which an actual client submits a professional brief to the students. These learning modules allow Master’s students to gain a deeper understanding of the theory and practice of designing, managing, and publicizing art and culture events by recreating the very dynamics of real-world project work.
Course Plan
The Specializing Master is made up of 1500 training hours overall: 432 in classes, seminars, and workshops or meetings with professionals, 300 in fieldwork internship, and 768 of supervised hands-on work, simulations, independent study, and preparation of midterm and final project work.
Learning Modules (30 credits total)
Taught by ALMED - Università Cattolica:
- Conceiving of Cultural Projects
- Contemporary Art and Visual Culture
- Cultural businesses and access to finance
Taught by POLI.design - Politecnico di Milano:
- Design and design thinking
- Design for Local Development
- Communication, new media and digital technologies
Seminars (10 credits total)
- Art interventions and processes of urban transformation
- Cultural tourism and identity of places
- Entrepreneurship and cultural innovation
- Budget and sustainability
- Fundraising and sponsorship
- Elements of Contemporary Aesthetics
- Media Theory
- Visual culture
- Museology
- Legislation of Cultural Heritage
- Exhibition design
- Visual design
- Media relations
- Team building
- Open Lectures
Project work (8 credits total)
- Project work - Midterm
- Project work – Final Exam
Internship
At the end of the path there is a period of curricular internship of three months, to include the student in the real context of policy design, management and communication of cultural projects. The choice of internship for each student will be gauged on the basis of individual training profile and projects underway at enterprises and agencies available to take on interns.
- International class
