The Material Design (md) Research Workshop is operated by the Department of Architecture in the Architecture Faculty of Ferrara, founded in 1987 and officially inaugurated with its first course in 1991-1992.
Although only twenty-year long, the history of the Faculty in Ferrara is extremely rich in events, qualifying choices, recognized results, nationally and internationally acquired reputation. The school has always focused on the direct and collaborative relationship between professors and students, making efforts in continuously support the strategic recruitment of new young lecturers, stably directing them to the academic profession or dynamically drawing on the professional world; these are teachers, in any case, active in both the didactical and in the architectural research domain. Constant as well is the effort of selecting a qualified group of students, remodeling, year after year, the access criteria and the number of enrolled students according to the different reforms of the national university system and to the development of the restoring activities at the vast and complex building of the Faculty that progressively makes more rooms available to our courses.
The Architecture Faculty of Ferrara, in order to guarantee an adequate relationship between the university education and the world of work, has started apprenticeships and postgraduate specialization courses in disciplinary domains of particular relevance and interest, allowing the updating and the immediate introduction of the graduated students in the professional world.
Being conscious of the evolution that characterizes the contemporary scenario of our society, the Architecture Faculty of Ferrara stimulates the students to experience formational activities abroad, promoting an elevated number of bursaries. The international relationships and exchanges are very intense: they interest Universities from fourteen countries of the European Union with the activation of Socrates/Erasmus programs, and numerous are the collaborations with Universities in South America, North America and New Zealand.
For various years, the Architecture Faculty of Ferrara has been at the top of the CENSIS quality rankings among all the Italian Faculties, classifying first several times among all the national Architecture Faculties. These positive results, highly confirmed through the years, are sustained by an organization and an administration aimed to reach the fixed targets, year after year, in the didactical and research activities.
Starting from the 2009-2010 Academic year, the Architecture Faculty of Ferrara adds to its didactical offer the Undergraduate course in Industrial Product Design. This new course is inserted in a “strategic asset” oriented to synergistically conjugate the productive realities of Emilia Romagna (characterized by the districts of ceramics, car manufacturing, fashion, furnishing etc.) with the ones of national Made in Italy, and more generally with the opportunities linked to the immaterial sources of research and of technological, formal and cultural innovation.
The course is reserved for a fixed number of 50 students per year, for a total of 150 enrolled students in the three years.
Valorizing these benchmarks and the acquired reputation, the Architecture Faculty of Ferrara wants to extend its activities to the external world, more than it has been doing so far, and to promote collaborations with institutions, public and private commissioners, professional categories, productive organizations; these collaborations are defined with agreements charters destined to research and institutional projects.
The md Material Design Research Workshop was created at the end of 2008 within the Faculty and its Department of Architecture, in the same year of the inauguration of Palazzo Tassoni, its headquarter. Through its research team and the interdisciplinary competences that it has acquired, the md Research Workshop’s commitment is to face the challenges of the economy of knowledge at the beginning of the Third Millennium.