Courses: Fall 2025

4.s24 Creative Careers: strategy, models, crossovers

Instructors: Giuliano Picchi
Semester: Fall 2025 H1
Credits: 2-1-3 G
Schedule: T 9-12
Location: 4-144

Creative careers: strategy, models, crossovers equips students in design, arts, and culture to transform their practice into sustainable professional pathways. Through lectures and labs, participants engage with cultural management, international frameworks, and entrepreneurial tools while experimenting in crossovers where creative practice generates new forms of value for society and industry. The course combines a value-based reading of cultural production with practical methods, preparing students to position their work in professional and market contexts with positive human impact.

This course is taught in a lecture and lab format and is intended for students with an interest in cultural and creative practice. Students engage with cultural economics and management, international cultural policy frameworks, and entrepreneurial tools, including business models, market positioning, branding, and intellectual property protection. Structured exercises guide them in understanding these tools and applying them directly to their own practice. In lab sessions, students explore crossovers as opportunities to test how their creative practice can generate value and contribute to innovation in other fields of society and industry, developing experimental propositions for real-world applications.

Students are invited, though not required, to begin the course with an initial sense of the professional output they would like to pursue (e.g., design, visual art, music, performance, cultural strategies, or consulting). Such an orientation can facilitate the application of the frameworks introduced in class, but it is not necessary for the labs, where new directions and value propositions are expected to emerge through exploration. The course sparks reflection and provides tools to design sustainable professional pathways by encouraging a value-based interpretation of cultural and creative production, and by helping students identify market opportunities that also have a positive human impact. Final presentations consolidate the learning process into professional outputs that may serve as the basis for further incubation.

Courses: Spring 2025

4.s24 – Building an Impactful Creative Career: Entrepreneurial Tools and Strategies – (MITdesignX course)

Instructors: Giuliano Picchi, Svafa Grönfeldt
Semester: Spring 2025
Credits: 2-0-4 G
Schedule: T 9-11
Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 20
Can Be Repeated for Credit: Yes