The strategies of plants as a key to reading and proposing solutions for the environmental and social transformations of our time: the University of Florence launches the new master "Futuro vegetale" which for the first time combines two different disciplines to train designers.
"Perhaps it is not so far when we will produce clean energy by replicating chlorophyll photosynthesis or we will plan the urban mobility of the metropolis by copying the efficiency and fluidity with which the root system of a lime tree develops. To do this, people will be able to apply the intelligence of plants to the solution of the complex problems that emerge from the environmental and social transformations of our age, "they explain from the university.
The challenge was raised by the first edition of the first level master "Futuro Vegetale. Plants, social innovation and project "of the University of Florence, an unprecedented experience in the Italian education scene, with the scientific coordination of the plant physiologist Stefano Mancuso and the sociologist Leonardo Chiesi.
 "The starting point - explains Mancuso, an ordinary general arboriculture and arboreal cultivation of the University of Florence - are the strategies of the plant world, always characterized by energetic parsimony, variety in the use of materials and absence of impact on the ecological environment. Surprising strategies that we will deepen to imagine with the students of the Master what is not yet there but there could be and to try to design it ".
The course will be divided into lectures, workshops and an intensive final workshop, encouraging the sharing of knowledge thanks to teamwork and synergy with the experience of which the students will be bearers.
 "Our goal - says Leonardo Chiesi, associate of Sociology of the environment and territory at the University of Florence - is to expose students to three forms of knowledge that have an approach to reality and different methodological tools, that of nature, that of company and that of design. Thanks to the dialogue between the different disciplines we aim to stimulate new creative processes in the students, able to affect the world and the problems related to the indiscriminate use of resources and the growing inequalities in the distribution of access to goods ".
Starting from the knowledge of the plant world, therefore, the training course - organized in collaboration with the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation of Florence - will ask students to think about how to translate biological models into strategic solutions applicable to virtuous social policies, sustainable actions and new models. organizations of public and private institutions.
To participate in the Master you must send the application for admission by January 3, 2018. The announcement and other information about the course are online on the Unifi site. Further information on www.futurovegetale.it.