Köln International School of Design
Philipp Heidkamp
The Global Design Initiative brings together global design education leaders who believe in new approaches in dialogue and exchange. Our project aims to investigate intercultural learning, to understand the use of narrative in design, the use of cultural artefacts, behaviors and places as source material for design intervention.
Once a year, one of the founding schools hosts the Global Design Initiative Workshop with a design project and 3 mixed student teams from five countries working intensively on a design brief, immersing in local places, connecting to people, exploring challenges – and responding through artefacts at the end of the week.
All professors from the five different schools/countries contribute to the process and provide input from different artistic/professional/cultural/institutional contexts. All students, all teams accomplished a final presentation to a diverse audience and receive feedback from stakeholders from local places.
Students experience intercultural collaborative design process and develop the ability to learn to work with diverse requirements and different approaches. They developed awareness of their own competencies in relation to other team members’ competencies.
