How to apply https://www.diarc.abit.unina.it/index.php/habit-phd-program-overview/research-project/

 

The Habitat in Transition (HabiT) doctoral program, offered by DiARC as part of the Abit project of excellence, prepares candidates who intend to undertake innovative and experimental research in the areas of different design disciplines, address the complexity of the challenges of global change, and lead society toward a sustainable and inclusive transition, capable of generating “new habitats” through the definition of original, feasible and effective exploratory pathways, supported by rigorous scientific methodologies and plural knowledge, combining advanced research with a broad educational program.

Complexity, understood as both a cognitive and organizational category of design, requires a holistic approach that transcends disciplinary boundaries and creatively reconnects design factors and external constraints, and reconsiders design as a context of sharings. A context capable of contemplating indeterminacy, as unpredictability but also as openness and deployment of decision-making and operational potential to attempt to exercise possible governance over the randomness and unpredictability of systems. Searching for new strategies of indeterminacy constitutes, therefore, a challenge for design disciplines to act within a problematic oxymoron but one that can open up numerous new possibilities.

Therefore, the HabiT doctoral program poses “design-led research” as a central issue, interpreting design research as a specific form of culturally and scientifically based research aimed at giving new answers to new problems. With this in mind, the Ph.D. is oriented toward an education that combines basic research, applied research and design. The research developed in the doctoral program, posing itself as a scientific apparatus that intends to establish relationships between producibility, design and the environment, will contribute to a paradigm shift that will make it possible to overcome disciplinary sectorization. As a result, doctoral research will have to place itself on the margins of acquired and shared knowledge in order to try to get in touch with other knowledge and other skills, working on what is between things, on the relations between knowledge, on the interoperability of information, in order to enrich and refine, rather than increase and structure, the potential of prefiguring and governing the project for change.

With this in mind, the HabiT program offers a multicultural and inter/trans-disciplinary research environment, characterized by the presence of faculty from all disciplinary fields in DiARC.

The research developed in the HabiT DdR will converge in the T-Lab, which will be activated as part of the DiARC-AbiT project of excellence. The objective of the T-Lab is to strengthen the synergies between the different disciplinary fields present in DiARC that contribute to the definition of adequate responses to the challenges posed by the Sustainable Transition, focusing on methodological and design innovation to outline transformative and evolutionary change scenarios and to enhance the dissemination and sharing of knowledge in multidimensional arenas, within public engagement and action-research activities.

The T-Lab constitutes the locus of interaction and hybridization between different but complementary cognitive and socio-technical systems, divided into four sections:

• • • knowledge and understanding;
  • • design and visioning;
  • • prototyping and fabrication;
    • engaging and interacting.

The experimental work centered on the T-Lab will enable an evolution of the teaching, pedagogical and research models that underlie the HabiT DdR’s educational offerings and contribute to the construction of multi-skilled researcher profiles through inter/trans-disciplinary approaches.

The program lasts three years, is taught in English and is based on three pillars:

1. 1. 1. Basic research, which includes methodological courses related to key aspects of theoretical and applied research in the various fields of sustainable change design and activities in prefiguring experimental methods applied to research;
      2. Specific research, which aims to strengthen doctoral students’ knowledge on specific topics aligned with their research interests and to increase their presence and standing in the international scientific community through participation in conferences and symposia and presentation of their scientific work in both academic and open societal settings;
      3. Development of the doctoral dissertation, which enables candidates to develop cutting-edge research skills and produce original, experimental scientific work on a topic that contributes significantly to the scientific debate while having a relevant positive impact on society.
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Objectives

The HabiT DdR program aims to train multicompetent researchers capable of conducting studies aimed at implementing feasible and effective transcalar design pathways and processes, supported by an expert and original analytical dimension. Researchers will gain the necessary awareness of the multiple opportunities of the design skills acquired and develop skills to open research to the experimentation of effective and feasible processes, aimed at exploring a field of possibilities in which to implement sustainable transitions, understood as the set of medium- and long-term transformation processes that enable societies to responsibly and consciously modify the environment, infrastructure and living spaces. These processes will be based on more sustainable modes of design, production and consumption, aiming to counter and reduce the negative effects of global change pressure on the environment and human habitat.

Students will acquire research skills and competencies and in-depth knowledge about the complexity of natural and artificial systems. They will learn advanced methodologies for understanding and modeling the physical, productive, social and digital processes that impact our planet’s ecosystem. They will develop projections of technological, ecological, economic and social trends to envision new solutions for sustainable habitats, while developing the necessary awareness of the underlying philosophical, anthropological and ethical issues.

Upon program completion, doctoral students are expected to possess the skills and abilities required to support and inform the processes of designing policies and strategies that can provide appropriate and innovative responses to sustainable human development.

Researchers involved in the doctoral program will be prepared, and adequately supported, to participate in scientific debate on an international scale, through the production of publications and dissemination. In addition, the social implications of the doctoral topics will further enhance the aspects of research related to public engagement activities, directing the sharing of knowledge also in their dissemination, as well as specialized, dimension.

In line with specific objectives of the National Research Program (“PNR”) and the priority areas of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (‘’PNRR’’), the doctoral program intends to define a field of research in which to pursue the goals of sustainable transition, outlining a new ecological epistemology, in which integral sustainability is based on a renewed dialogue between culture, nature, society and economy, in a “pluriverse” dimension that challenges the development models of modernity, prefiguring an eco-socio-technical system centered on new economies.

Students will be encouraged to spend at least one semester at a foreign research institution, where they will be able to take advantage of the department’s network of international collaborations (and others that will be activated on a targeted basis) to internationalize the doctoral program and to place research results in international contexts where debate and discussion of the challenges faced is most active.

The DdR HabiT program encourages the development of rigorous and speculative dissertations that question the issues and approaches to the project, as well as its professional and disciplinary mandate, soliciting challenging responses that are open to change.

Employment and professional career opportunities

Ph.D.s at the end of the course will be equipped with specific skills and advanced inter/trans-disciplinary knowledge that can open up career opportunities as researchers, consultants, designers, planners or planners at national and international universities and research centers, research and development departments of public and private companies and entities, public administrations, cultural institutions, nongovernmental organizations, foundations and social cooperatives that require in-depth specialization and advanced, informed experience in project-led research to address the complexity of the challenges posed by sustainable transition. Employment opportunities are also expected within design and service companies engaged in the search for eco-systemic responses to climate change and new urban imaginaries within which to experiment and develop processes of social innovation and sustainable transition.

Planned teachings

I year

1. Research theories and methods (12 CFU)

The course aims to provide the doctoral student with knowledge of the theories and methods of project-driven research, consistent with approaches defined as “by design.” The doctoral student will learn, through experimentation on case studies of reference new ways of research, practice and exegesis.

2. Innovative methods of scientific investigation (12 CFU)

The course aims to provide the doctoral student with knowledge of the main methods underlying the most innovative inter/trans-disciplinary scientific inquiry practices applicable to the field of project-driven research.

II year

3. Research management in the international field (12 CFU)

The course aims to provide the doctoral student with the opportunity to interact with national and international scientific research institutions and networks to foster discussion on the most advanced topics and methodologies.

4. Enhancement of scientific research results (12 CFU)

This course aims to introduce issues related to the valorization and dissemination of scientific results, intellectual property, open access to data and research products, and research ethics into the doctoral student’s education.

5. Dissemination of scientific research results (12 CFU)

The course aims to introduce into the doctoral student’s training central issues related to the development of rigorous and speculative dissertations on the research topics addressed with a view to participation in international conferences and publications in international scientific books and journals.