Promoting cross-collaboration and peer learning to ignite innovation

AUTHOR
Marite Guevara
YEAR
PROJECT RELATED
Innovation Alliance in Circular Design (CiD)
LEARN MORE AT
https://www.ersilia.org/innovation-alliance-in-circular-design-cid/
Some of the most original ideas don’t appear in the middle of a single discipline, they surface at its edges, where one field meets another. Innovation is, to a large degree, recombination: bringing together knowledge, methods, and ways of seeing that don’t usually sit side by side. When an architect, a materials engineer, and a designer examine the same problem, each arrives with a different vocabulary and a different set of assumptions. It is precisely in the overlap and the friction between them that genuinely new solutions tend to emerge. Crossing disciplines, in other words, doesn’t just add perspectives, it multiplies the possible combinations from which innovation is made.

But placing people from different fields in the same room is not enough on its own. What matters just as much is how they learn from one another. Knowledge is not simply transferred from expert to novice; it is co-constructed socially, through dialogue, observation, and shared practice. Lev Vygotsky’s social-constructivist work captures this in the idea of the “zone of proximal development” (Mind in Society, 1978): we reach further when working alongside others who are slightly ahead of us. Albert Bandura’s social learning theory adds that much of what we come to know, we learn by watching and modelling the people around us. In short, we learn fastest with and through others.

This is the conviction behind our work in the Innovation Alliance in Circular Design (CiD) and the reason we designed the programme around cross-collaboration and peer learning rather than instruction alone.

To promote cross-collaboration and peer learning among students from LUH, UNIGE, and IAAC, we introduced three transversal challenges to work with:
  1. keep-in-use strategies,
  2. bio-regional material flows
  3. storytelling for bio-based materials

Addressing the transversal challenge of  ‘keep-in-use’ for urban circularity means extending the life of materials, buildings, and urban elements.

It’s about preserving, like in Tallinn where old industrial fabric was transformed into co-working spaces;
Adapting underused areas — like the spaces beneath bridges;
And transforming, for example, by giving old lamps a second life.
It’s circularity through creativity and care.

Addressing bio-regional material flows means promoting sustainable, closed-loop systems by using bio-based materials and regenerating local resources within ecologically and culturally connected regions.



The map shows a collaboration between design and fashion industries in areas like Milan, Chiasso, Varese, and Como, working together to develop innovative mycelium-based materials, that are already replacing leather in fashion. And it’s design that’s driving this material innovation.

The third transversal challenge, Storytelling for bio-based materials, products, and services. Adopting bio-based materials requires transformation, not only in design practices, but across society.

And success with bio-based innovation depends on more than great ideas,  it needs effective communication, compelling storytelling, and strong stakeholder engagement to build awareness, trust, and adoption.

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