ISIA Roma Design is the first Higher Education Institute of the MIUR (Prot. no. 3700 of 1973). Founded in Rome by Giulio Carlo Argan and Aldo Calò, it was born out of the need to train professionals in the wake of the great European intellectual and pedagogical tradition, exemplified in the Bauhaus and the School of Ulm, realities from which it inherits and develops a methodological framework of excellence grafted onto the great Italian tradition of creativity and innovation.
ISIA has received two Compasso d’Oro and nine Targhe Giovani ADI awards, a medal and a plaque from the President of the Republic, a stamp from the Italian Post Office, eleven Samsung SYDA awards, and some 260 additional awards of great national and international prestige.
ISIA Roma Design identifies design as the essential moment of the dialectic and interaction between the individual and society, demand and sustainability, expression and reflection, understanding design as a configuration of excellence of all kinds of instrumental production and ingenuity.
On the strength of 50 years of activity, structurally based on research and experimentation, it can count today on a cultural heritage and a scientific and educational experience that is almost unique in Italy, capable of providing the student with the appropriate means to identify the profound socioeconomic and technological changes taking place and translate them into acts of creation, qualifying the designer both as a bearer of renewed material culture and as an interpreter of the immateriality of our age.
Its founders included Rodolfo Bonetto, Enzo Frateili, Renato Pedio, Andries Van Onck, Vittorio Franchetti Pardo, Corrado Maltese, Augusto Morello, Sergio Pininfarina, and Luigi Ferro.

The Educational Offer
The educational model of ISIA of Rome, which was awarded the Compasso d’Oro by the ADI in 1979, still represents a reference of avant-garde and experimentation for training and teaching methodology, as well as for research and design orientations in the field of design.
ISIA of Rome fosters in the student the use of methods and tools aimed at the full expression of acquired knowledge and critical and creative skills, offering the opportunity to create projects and models of interest to design-oriented companies, creating awareness of complexity and the ability to assume design responsibilities in business systems.
ISIA of Rome’s educational model is functionally characterized by: a favorable teacher/student ratio and a strong community spirit; a faculty selected from the academic and professional worlds, verified annually and committed to interdisciplinary form; assiduous contact with businesses through professional experience and the opportunity to operate through its own research center (ISIDE Research Lab) in innovative fields; a curriculum responsive to emerging needs and able to adapt quickly to the demand for new professional profiles; and rapid entry into the world of work.
The curriculum is based on three-year courses in design (product and communication curricula) and product design, two-year specialized courses in systemic design for services and products, systemic design for communication, and product system design, as well as Ph.D. courses, university collaborations, cultural and environmental heritage enhancement, and PA service design.
ISIA Roma Design, convinced of the need to disseminate the cultural and methodological values that identify it, albeit in the limited numbers around the teaching provided, in order to safeguard the quality of teaching, the student-faculty relationship and the design and research results, activated in 2010 a three-year decentralized course in Pordenone, in agreement with and at the Pordenone University Consortium.
Here it proposes each year the Pordenone Design Week, a unique event in which education meets the territory, local institutions and its companies by promoting research and innovation activities in the field of design and visual communication.