Design Italian Way is a new competition organised by Fiat Auto that began today and will end in September 2007, pitting the creativeness and talents of students from eight of the most important design schools in the world one against the other. The goal? To design “the Italian way” and to stimulate ideas, proposals and suggestions for the Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo models of tomorrow. The prizes are 24 grants to spend five months working full-time in the Fiat, Lancia or Alfa Romeo Style Centres.

In the futuristic new premises of the Engineering & Design department’s Learning Centre in Mirafiori, the Brand Managers and the heads of the Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo Style Centres met the Heads and Study Coordinators of the colleges taking part in the project: the European Design Institute of Turin, the Faculty of Design of Milan Polytechnic, the College for Creative Studies of Detroit, Coventry University of Art and Design, Tokyo Communications Arts, the Stroganov State University of Moscow, the National Institute of Design of Ahmedebad (India) and the Institute of Design of Umea University (Sweden).

At the meeting, the guests were shown photographs and films that revealed how the car has changed, and how Italian design has developed over the years. Each head of the brands Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo illustrated the guidelines that the work had to follow. In addition to innovation, which is common to all three brands, for Fiat, the projects must focus on dynamism, elaborating concepts for the next Panda. For Lancia, the principle will be elegance, and the development of two cars addressing two different customer targets. And finally, Alfa Romeo will focus on sportiness, with the possibility of choosing between “briefs” for three different cars.