ISIA Urbino - Istituto Superiore Industrie Artistiche

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ISIA Urbino is a graphic design and visual communication school. It is a school with a strong identity which be summarised as workshop based with local area and regional bonds and focused on design’s political dimen-sions understood as a form of attention to its socio-economic implications. The institute’s identity is bound up with Italy’s history, with the healthy and productive Italy whose roots lie in the post Second World War period. ISIA is a place in which to learn social commitment and cultural design practices. The institute was set up in 1962 as a CSAG—Corso Superiore per Arte Grafi-ca (Higher Education in Graphic Art Programme). It was Albe Steiner, invited by the Scuola del Libro’s then principal, who shaped the programme’s struc-ture in a lively intellectual climate in which Carlo Bo, Rector of Urbino University, philosopher Livio Schirollo and architect Giancarlo De Carlo also took part. Steiner saw designers as intellectuals for whom both cultural and technical elements were equally essential and indissolubly linked. In 1971 Steiner was succeeded by Michele Provinciali whose subjective and emotional approach to design, inspired by his studies at the Chicago Institute of Design, played a determinant role in the school’s evolution. A central novelty in his educational approach was a new preparatory course whose goal was to take students back to a hypothetical primitive creative stage. Steiner and Provinciali represented two very different historical visions of design which converged into a shared emphasis on social commitment and responsibility externalised via political involvement in socio-cultural reform or seen as a more intimate focus on context and culture’s material traces. In 1974 the school became an ISIA - Instituto Superiore per Industrie Artis-tiche (Institute of Higher Education in the Artistic Industries) - joining the ranks of the AFAM - Alta Formazione Artistica e Musicale (Higher Artistic and Musical Education) - which ensured it wide ranging educational autonomy and flexibility. Today ISIA Urbino’s educational programme is an inter-disciplinary one. The teaching body is made up of professionals of proven quality and diverse ori-gins, from both Italy and abroad. As a laboratory school ISIA Urbino can adapt easily to the changing contemporary scene making it an optimal place in which to develop and prototype new design professions, functions and economies.