Disruptive Attitude: the role of Design as Anomaly; managing crisis and turbulence, coaching creativity and innovation.

Design today is a discipline moving between art and method. Despite its involvement within industrial activities and available engineering tools, the role of the designer is always perceived as related to creativity; such a role is commonly felt in the universities. In widening the design action fields from industrial products to communication, fashion, services, and so on (i.e. from material immaterial goods), the complexity of the problems to cope with introduced the use of conceptual tools based on ethnographic aspects, to define constraints and to provide scenarios, from which to derive the proper features. Despite the value of these methods, the results in applying them largely depend on the kind of users the designer is able to imagine, i.e. the method follows a Garbage In Garbage Out model. More, those methods are biased toward the improvement of what is already known, instead of fostering creativity and innovation, therefore perpetuating stereotypes and consumerism. The paper criticises the (mis)use of ethnographic tools, and suggests a different approach, based on formal models, and a disruptive attitude, to provide real innovation possibilities. The discussion refers mainly to the educational processes and testifies experiences in that field, together with examples of the proposed approach.