Didactics and research in design during emergencies, How emergency state has modified – and will modifiy – the tools for teaching and research in design

Confronting the contemporary context, it is clear that the succession of emerging events – most notably the worldwide spread of the Covid-19 virus, previously known as 2019-nCoV (Xu, et al. 2020) - is bringing more and more structures and educational institutions at all levels, to suspend their teaching activities, not only in an attempt to avoid gatherings but above all to protect the health of students, researchers, teachers and - in general - of technical, administrative and logistic staff. What appeared to be a temporary emergency situation tends to take on a less transitory character, thus highlighting the possible limits of a training system that is not yet fully ready to move from frontal and laboratory teaching to telematic teaching, i.e. the passage from schools and universities desks to home stations. The contribution, developed from the direct experiences of two Ph.D. students, one with an industrial characterization with a focus on industrial design and biomedical design, the other with the mainline of research on graphic design, aims to be a moment for reflection, starting from the detection and analysis of the opinions - collected through interviews - of the teaching staff, researchers and students of some Italian universities, who found themselves in the position of having to change their training and study method, to ask themselves about the effective effectiveness of the digital devices and software suites and productivity tools for cloud computing and telework in general - such as G-Suite and Microsoft Teams. The choice to structure/adopt adequate tools that can facilitate training, the advancement of the state of research, and didactic and tutoring activities, is, therefore, an open question mainly linked to the hypothesis of offering the same possibility, if not even increased, for students and researchers who find themselves conducting a course of study in design, in which interpersonal discussion remains one of the main tools for triggering profitable training and dialogue dynamics. What has been said takes on even greater importance if we consider the fundamental role that design is called upon to play during emergencies, which require a re-modulation of daily activities: as in fact the scientific literature highlights, the design has the role of facing challenges and respond promptly to the needs of the contemporary context (Piscitelli, 2019) helping the population to react with consciousness and awareness to emerging situations. Based on what has been outlined above, the distinctive feature of the contribution is, therefore, to constitute a sort of proactive experimentation, born as a collateral effect of the state of emergency but potentially scalable in a tool for greater accessibility to the study, by which it is believed that, through interviews and opinions, it will be possible to derive a model that, starting from the tools of the wider topic of e-learning, can become, despite its limitations, a more effective method for distance learning and the establishment of online and virtual laboratory and project activities.