Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

The school director was Gillian Crampton Smith,[1]] and the school's mission was described in Blueprint [2] as:

"While following in the spirit of the CRD[3] course, Ivrea will explore business in addition to design and technology. Crampton Smith believes that today there is an 'art' in imagining new business models, and is also aware that, partly because of their broad education, design graduates often move into strategic roles in companies and need to be equipped to learn for themselves."

The school operated from 2001[4] to 2005,[5] finally merging its teaching programme with Domus Academy and subsequently ceasing operating as an independent entity when its initial 5-year endowment ran out; the new Telecom Italia ownership decided not to renew the funding. Its exhibition design unit (E1) was spun off to form an independent company, Interaction Design Lab,[6] currently operating in Milan. Among the academic advisors of Interaction Ivrea were leading practitioners and theorists like John Maeda, Ranjit Makkuni, Joy Mountford, John Thackara, Bill Verplank, Nathan Shedroff,[7] Bill Moggridge (co-founder of IDEO) and David Liddle (co-founder of Interval Research).

Interaction Ivrea student work was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert's museum in London [8] and at Salone del Mobile in Milan. It was also part of the Convivio [9] Network of Excellence European research project.

While the Institute also did a measure of outside consulting work and hosted visiting researchers, its main activity was the Interaction Design Master course, a 2-year course which graduated four classes of approximately 20 students each over its existence. Graduates of Interaction Ivrea now work throughout the design spectrum. The institute was involved in many projects that later became very visible in the design world: among them, the prototyping boards Wiring and Arduino, the graphics software prototyping environment Processing (started at the MIT MediaLab), the CICCIO inflatable environment[10] and the Interaction Design Primer design manual.[11] Ivrea alumni and ex-faculty now work in places like NABA, Domus Academy, IDEO, IXDS, Università Iuav di Venezia,[12] VCU, the Delft University of Technology, the Centro Metropolitano de Diseño of the City of Buenos Aires ,University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, and fashion company CuteCircuit. Interaction Design Institute Ivrea alumni and former staff members set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in 2006.

A partial archive of Interaction-Ivrea's website can be found at http://interactionivrea.org/en/index.asp