Education, in its broadest sense, is today one of the structures that have been most affected by the changes of our time. The reflection on educational structures is today a reality that breaks into global reality. In this way, the need and urgency to interpret its complexity has led different international educational institutions to explore the possible scenarios of the future.

Throughout its 50 years, the IED has been a leading actor in the fields of education and Design. During this period, the IED has managed to build its own space with ways of doing and thinking that have earned it international recognition. Certainly, the IED emerged motivated by a deep vocation of modernity, innovation, looking to the future... involving thousands of people who, in the initial project and in its later development, found a space in which to give life to ideas, a space where Design could indeed build all our dreams.

Today the IED is an international design education Network, capable of generating a culture of innovation that allows it to face new challenges and assume new strategic objectives, thus facing the task of building a space for education and research where the new ways of designing life, namely those structural conditions that shape the way we can inhabit and participate in our cities and societies.  

Our world is shown as an infinite landscape of information, where there are no unique interpretation tools. The inherited education models have become obsolete, announcing the end of the transmission of knowledge as the pillar on which the teaching and learning processes revolved. Today, education points to a horizon of interactions where new competences emerge regarding the ability to orient oneself in complexity, the ability to know how to critically interpret the new map of social, cultural and economic relationships, identifying spaces for transformation and innovation.

In this way, school can and should be understood as a laboratory - a space where questions, processes and tools are shared. Drawing from creativity and critical thinking, it should be a space where you learn by projects, personalized learning rhythms, dialogue with other disciplines, producing knowledge ... These ideas should be inserted within the Network structure, leading to a network education that is both collaborative and participatory.

From an educational model open to the new complexities of our time, the IED can initiate innovative processes in Design education. These processes should progressively open the field of action of Design to other disciplines, offering their own language as an innovation tool capable of generating new interactions with knowledge. Thus, Design can dialogue with Health, Food, Environment, Technology, and Business ... generating new skills and projecting the professions of the future.

Design education, understood as a tool for social, cultural and economic transformation, is today called to generate and lead the great changes of our time. Before the IED lie both the challenge and the opportunity to actively participate in these transformations, forming open-minded designers with a sense of challenge, who are flexible, optimistic, creative ... capable of pointing out and projecting new ways of living.