Exhibition Design

Course

The IDEA Exhibition Design – The Architecture of Exhibition, first-level Specializing Master, aims to turn out highly qualified professionals in exhibition design.

Exhibition design is the planning that involves places, spaces, and architecture to set up conceptual apparatus, physical facilities, exhibits, and installations whose purpose is communication in the broadest sense.

Shows, booths, stores, trade fairs, museums, shopping centers, trading areas, meeting places, sales outlets, performance-art spaces, and public squares and streets all call on exhibition design in a crescendo of meaningful experience and with an ongoing refinement of skills.

Such skills and experience revolve around the specific relationship between architecture as ‘interior design’ and ‘exposition architecture,’ i.e. the set of dedicated exhibition techniques that take shape and become operative in these interior spaces.

The Italian Association of Exhibition Designers, IDEA, founded in 2007 by highly qualified professionals in the field, has as its mission to certify the quality of exhibition design and to highlight the growing role of the exposition discipline in the contexts of culture, marketing, and communication.  IDEA found the ideal partner for its Specializing Master in the Politecnico di Milano, whose tradition of excellence helped launch the program with enthusiasm and a passion for the culture of exhibit design, in keeping with the association’s mission.

Some numbers

Didactics

Training objectives

The objective of this Specializing Master is to train a new kind of professional designer whose specialist skills lie in the various application domains of exhibition design (shows, trade fairs, museums, sales outlets, events and stage setting).  These professionals need cultivated dynamism that will enable them to respond with expertise to the varied scales of exhibition design and to the multifaceted briefs they are commissioned with.  Above all, they have to have a high awareness of their professional identity.

This program includes an approximately 350-hour guided internship segment that aims to place the student as a trainee in an exhibition-design context.  Internships are available at major institutions that have a consolidated working relationship with this Specializing Master, such as:

MAGA di Gallarate, MART di Rovereto, Triennale di Milano, Sloowfood, Studio Angelo Jelmini, Studio Baldessari&Baldessari, Studio Carmadesign, Studio Cerri & Associati, Studio Crea International, Studio Dedalo, Karim Azzabi Architects, Studio Migliore+Servetto, Studio Origoni Steiner, Designnetwork, Studio Storage, Way spa, Benfenati spa, RetailDesign.

MAGA di Gallarate, MART di Rovereto, Triennale di Milano, Sloowfood, Studio Angelo Jelmini, Studio Baldessari&Baldessari, Studio Carmadesign, Studio Cerri & Associati, Studio Crea International, Studio Dedalo, Karim Azzabi Architects, Studio Migliore+Servetto, Studio Origoni Steiner, Designnetwork, Studio Storage, Way spa, Benfenati spa, RetailDesign. 

Didactic Plan

The lessons of the Master will be held mainly in Italian with teaching aids also in English. The project laboratories (workshops) and the reviews can also be carried out in English, as well as the presentations of the project papers and final thesis by students where it is expressed as a preference.

The Master is established with the purpose to highly form qualified professional profiles in the sector of the exhibition design. The exhibition design is an ambit of the project which has boundaries that are not definable in clean way; it uses languages and multiple tools that concern the “architecture of the insides” and the interior design: the constructive detail, the materials, the technologies, the graphics and the multimedia; it is a discipline with a lot of derivations and with numerous applications, to which the economic world and the cultural institutions assign and more and more will assign a fundamental role.

In extreme synthesis, the exhibition design is that project that, involving places, spaces and architectures, predisposes conceptual and physical apparatuses (exhibits and installations) aimed to communication in its widest meanings.

In this epoch of informative redundance and global and undiversified virtuality, it is in fact assuming importance the physical dimension of the expositive communication (an articulated and complex tool to communicate contents of any kind) that to the art of exhibition design it is submitted for being concretely revealed.

Temporary exhibitions, museums, fairs, stands, retail shops and places of the commerce, places of the meeting, spaces of performative arts, streets and urban public plazas: all these spaces use some kind of exhibition design in a meaningful growing of experiences and with a continuous refinement of competences that rotate around the specific relationship between the architecture, seen as “inner space”, and the “architecture of display”, i.e. the whole devices that in these inside spaces take form and operate.

Didactic Modules

First module: Frontal teaching

• Theory and history of exhibition design
• Theory and history of museography
• New Types of Permanent and Temporary Exhibitions
• Contemporary Art Languages
• History of applied graphics
• Design of public spaces
• Materials and technologies
• Lighting Design
• Multimedia
• Sound Design

Second module: Exercises with lessons of complementary subjects, divided into 3 distinct workshops

Workshop – exhibition design, museums and cultural events –

• workshop
• Graphics applied to the project
• Managing and organising exhibitions and events
• Lighting technology
• Museography

Workshop – Trade fair and exhibition stand construction –

• workshops
• Security
• Trade fair marketing
• Type of trade fairs

Workshop – retail space design – workshops –

• workshop
• Typology of retail spaces

Total internship hours: 350 h

Title Released

Students who successfully complete the program and pass the final exam will be awarded a first-level Specializing Master in Exhibition Design, IDEA.

Employment Opportunities

The expected job descriptions include:

High qualified freelancer, exhibition designer in companies, retail chains and shops, exhibition designer incompanies in the fair field, cultural exhibitions and events, communication agencies, exhibition designer with responsabilities interms of the cultural sector in culturalinstitutions, museums, foundations, public andprivate corporations, public administrations; experts in production and installation of exhibit systems.

Admission

Requirements

This program is aimed at those who hold a degree in architecture, industrial design, engineering, art history, cultural heritage, applied art or communication (humanities).

Foreign students may present equivalent degrees earned abroad.

Deadlines

To take part in the XIX edition of the Specializing Master in Exhibition Design, starting on November 24th, 2025, applications must be submitted according to the following criteria*:

Italian qualification within 60 days before the starting date

STEP 1
1) Documents to be sent for preliminary verification to POLI.design

• Curriculum vitae
• Portfolio
• Motivation letter
• Copy of ID document
• Other

The following documents should be uploaded on this page

2) Documents to be sent for preliminary verification to Politecnico

• ID document copy
• Copy of the Diploma Supplement and copy of the degree diploma or self-certification on the appropriate form that can be requested to POLI.design (selezioni@polidesign.net)
• ANIS certification (access to the ANIS portal is via SPID or CIE from the following link)

The following documents are to be uploaded on this page by following the instructions at this link
____________________

European qualification within 60 days before the starting date

STEP 1
1) Documents to be sent for preliminary verification to POLI.design

• Curriculum vitae
• Portfolio
• Motivation Letter
• Copy of ID document

The following documents should be uploaded on this page

2) Documents to be sent for preliminary verification to Politecnico

• Copy of ID document
• Copy of Diploma Supplement
• Photocopy of degree certificate

The following documents are to be uploaded on this page by following the instructions at this link

STEP 2
1) Documents to be sent for authenticity verification (within 45 days before the start date) 

• Diploma Supplement with a digital signature or verifiable QR code. Should the student lack a Diploma Supplement with a valid signature or verifiable QR code to verify its authenticity, the student will have to submit one of the documents required for students with a non-EU qualification (cfr. next item).

The following documents are to be uploaded on this page by following the instructions at this link
____________________

Non-EU degree within 60 days before the start date

STEP 1
1) Documents to be sent for preliminary verification to POLI.design

• Curriculum vitae
• Portfolio
• Motivation Letter
• Copy of ID document

The following documents should be uploaded on this page

2) Documents to be sent for preliminary verification to Politecnico

• Copy of ID document
• Degree in original language + Italian/English translation
• Original transcript of passed examinations + Italian/English translation

The following documents are to be uploaded on this page by following the instructions at this link

STEP 2
1) Documents to be sent for authenticity verification (within 45 days before the start date) 

• Enic/ Naric Certification or CIMEA 
• World Education Services (WES) Certification 
• Statement of value 
• Copy of the visa application or copy of the visa

According to the timeframe provided for by Italian law, the details of the application for a residency permit must also be communicated as well as the residency permit as soon as it is issued.

The following documents are to be uploaded on this page by following the instructions at this link

*Applications submitted after the deadline may be considered at the discretion of the Scientific Committee.

Price

The cost of the University Specializing Master’s programme is € 11.500,00 broken down as follows:

• € 500,00 – enrolment fee to be paid to the Politecnico di Milano, no later than 30 days before the starting date following the procedures that POLI.design will specify;
• € 11.000,00 – participation fee for the University Master’s Course to be paid to POLI.design following the procedures that will be specified upon admission.

PROMO

FAMILY SUPPORT: -50%
A chance to gift your siblings the encouragement they need to invest in their future.

POLI.NETWORK: -50%
A promotion designed to strengthen the bond and identity among members of the Politecnico di Milano community.

BACK TO SCHOOL: -1.000€ on Specializing Masters
The discount for those who have already trusted POLI.design and Polimi, and wish to return to study and build their future.

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Faculty

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Past editions