The Hiatus project aims and aimed to pursue the following objectives: General objective: to develop within the school context a teaching methodology that uses design skills for the implementation of products/services - service design thinking. Specific objectives - target teachers: to develop the ability to reorient their training offer, to develop a customer-student orientation in terms of listening, analysis and reading of needs; Specific objectives - target students: to develop self-orientation skills to face market challenges, the ability to critically and constructively reflect, to transform ideas into actions and to engage in creative processes; to strengthen technical-professional skills that can be used in innovative work contexts; Specific transversal objectives: to increase design skills for the development of ideas and projects; to develop a customer orientation; to increase knowledge relating to digital tools; to create a European network between the actors involved.
The increasingly pervasive digital transformation, exacerbated by the Covid-19 emergency, has catapulted contemporary societies into a climate of continuous change and need for updating and adapting skills, especially among young people. Developing skills based on critical thinking, creative planning and entrepreneurship is therefore essential. In this sense, school is configured as a place of development, which however needs to become a place dedicated to learning innovation, the engine of change in training approaches. It is then essential to bring the world of work closer to the world of school in order to collect all the needs coming from the market and transform them into learning objects, involving local companies. To do this, it is necessary to work on the skills of school staff and teachers, who can trigger a change and promote training based on the development of skills. This was and is the idea from which the HIATUS project was born, based on the existence of a discrepancy between the entry requirements required by the labor market and the skills leaving school.