Inter-generation and knowledge transmission. The ‘Essential tension’ in the hybrid nature of design discipline

The reflection on inter-generational dynamics, and on the role of the inter/trans- actions that can be activated in design, is read in this contribution through a reflection on the notion of discipline as an instrument of inter-generational transmission of knowledge and as a tool for inter-disciplinary confrontation. This last aspect came into play in the design debate when it entered the university system. Since then, the problem of defining disciplinary boundaries and determining its trans-actions with other disciplines - present in the university institutions and competing in the formation of the figure of the designer - has arisen. This problem for design, more than for other disciplines, is inherent to its very “hybrid nature that design shares with other design disciplines, located halfway between formalised knowledge (science, mathematics, etc.) and humanistic knowledge (Riccini, 2013," pp.1-2), or linked to the “composite nature of its own design and cultural space” (Riccini, 2013, p.2).Design was organized in Italy as a scientific university discipline only very recently, with the launching in the mid-1990s of autonomous courses of study within the faculties of architecture, with which it shared the reflection on the hybrid nature of design disciplines. This paper intends to articulate a reflection that, taking into account the debate on disciplinary divisions inhe- rited from the structures of scientific specialisms that arose at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Geymonat, 1970), investigates the paradigms of innovation in scientific research, clarifying precisely the role of the notion of discipline (Kuhn, 1959-2006, pp.79-96, Kuhn, 1962-2006, Fabiani, 2006, pp.11-34). The aim is to offer some food for thought to feed the Italian debate on these issues, given the young academic age of the design.