IED Istituto Europeo di Design Barcelona

The Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) is a private design school in Italy founded in 1966 by Francesco Morelli. The school is organized into four disciplines: Design, Fashion, Visual Communication and Management. It is spread over nine cities - Milan, Turin, Venice, Cagliari, Florence, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid and Sao Paulo - and thirteen locations which occupy more than 50,000 square meters of space. A cultural, industrial and financial centre on the world scale, Barcelona has, among many merits, that of organizing the First World Culture Forum in 2004, a sign of the attention this city pays to the complex issues of globalisation, issues that IED tackles on its campus here, where it trains designers to be capable of understanding, experimenting and developing new tools for designing and managing the great transformations taking place in society. Here they learn to work in the various fields of design, as well as to recognise and manage the macrotrends of change as and before they come about. Understanding complexity, the disciplinary interactions at work in design and how to manage processes of transformation is the focus of design management. In this sense, the IED Barcelona is a workshop for conducting analysis and research applied to material culture, a focus it is destined to develop increasingly in future.