Design x Cultures

Description

Successful summer course experiment that addressed a globally charged topic and the challenge of working with five different cultures and languages, in four different timezones, while integrating local community in the digital age with tools that supported asynchronous as well as synchronous learning.

Takeaway

This presentation showcases the collective efforts it took a team of five faculty in four different timezones that resulted in exemplary cross collaborative projects with high community impact – a testament to the importance of collaboration on various levels John Maeda mentions in the 2019 interview “Helping Creativity happen from a Distance” as one of the first things designers need to understand.

Abstract

In the fall of 2018 five global players in digital higher education came together to build an online collaborative class, called Design x Cultures. This class had been offered by faculty members of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in conjunction with Kyoto University and the European Institute of Design Milano a year prior, and was adapted for the summer of 2019 to be offered via an online platform also to students from the Universidad ORT Uruguay and Texas State University. Each university provided a team of five to seven students to participate in a two-week intense virtual asynchronous class experience, as well as a community partner to work with. The prompt students were given the very first day of their online class was “Migration” – a subject matter very differently experienced in these five cultures. The class had all of the student teams working together through interactive, online platforms that transcended the limits of space and time. It was extremely eye-opening for all team members to hear about how this broad and highly-charged topic was so different and similar all around the world. The teams completed various assignments designed to help students consider and engage with differ! ent perspectives and cultures. Each team joined with a community partner and, using human-centered design and design thinking methodologies, developed a proposed solution for the partnering organization.