The fundamental objective of the International Research and Education Programme CHAOS is to contribute to the building and spreading of a “complexity culture” - understood as a culture of responsibility, prevention, sustainability, but also a culture of communication between knowledge and skills – from both within and “without” educational and training institutions (schools and universities) and complex organisations (public, private and social).

The current pandemic has generated a social, cultural and economic emergency, an emergency of both information and communication, whose dynamics are best described metaphorically by “the butterfly effect”, highlighting the radically interconnected and interdependent nature of reality.

Consequently, only through the systemic, multi/inter/transdisciplinary approach typical to complexity sciences can reality actually be studied. Our universities and schools, therefore, along with the rest of the society, can no longer shirk from thoroughly rethinking the overall architecture of knowledge and competences (1995), so as to create the conditions for a substantial and profitable dialogue among disciplinary fields, which are still marked today by the logics of separation and confinement of knowledge and competences. Another strategic objective, in this sense, is to actively reconstruct a fruitful dialogue between the world of science and the world of art and creativity, between “the sciences” and “the arts”.