Going Global is an overview and collection of Philipp Heidkamp´s activities in the process of design and design education as a global topic – at KISD, for KISD and with the Cumulus Association
Read more Read lessI am frequently running workshops abroad in the field of Interface / Interaction Design, Human Environment Interaction, City as Interface as well as Culture of Digitalization
In those domains my focus is on cities, citizen, communities, mobility and food.
Cumulus is the only global association to serve art and design education and research. It is a forum for partnership and transfer of knowledge and best practices. KISD joins Cumulus since 2002, Ans since some years we engage in the work of Cumulus in working groups, through our track „Emerging Formats“ at the 2019 Rovaniemi conference and since then with my Work as Executive Board Member of the 7th Board (2019-2022) and my role as Vice President of the global network. This challenge will give a lot of new opportunities that will be shared here as well.
Global Design Initiative (see also the website under construction).
The Global Design Initiative is founded by the Global Design Faculty driven by five international, globally oriented art and design institutions based in London, Cologne, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo. It brings together like-minded people, mainly global design education leaders who believe in new approaches in dialogue and exchange.
Running a full-semester project in winter term 2019 with 13 experienced and passionate students from 8 nations. The project aims at investigating the question how cities (and their dwellers) can be connected to both food and agriculture / farmers using data and information technology. In preparing the workshop, I was really surprised how much technology is already used in smallholder farming in different areas all over the worlds. In the US, Australia and New Zealand all forms of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) evolved to new levels using information about the food on the field, the way the farmers work and strengthen the community of consumers and farmers by different scenarios using remote technology. IBM uses blockchain in large style industrial food tracking – a technology that has not yet unfolded its full potential especially for smallholder farmers reducing the middlemen and allowing consumers and farmers to connect in a new way and thus empowering the farmer thorough better prices as well as increased quality and ecology of the products. In Africa, low-end technology (GSM-based text communication) informs remote and isolated farmers about weather forecast, harvesting and cropping times, diseases as well as possible prices to achieve. The same here: empowering the farmer, encouraging the production of better quality. In China, high-end infrastructure allows live-streaming platforms like Alibaba´s Taobao to engage new stakeholder, connect remotely to the farmers and increasing not only the sales of the products, but also the understanding, the value and closeness of the remote clients in the city – both for products but also for farming. The KISDspace platform is giving a good insight to this project.
In November 2019, we had a workshop with 6 KISD students and 18 students from SCID MA Industrial design. We worked in 6 mixed teams on 6 topics:
It was quite a challenge to embed this workshop with mixed teams in the process of our semester project with half of the students staying and KISD – and still stay connected. We established COM at KISD spaces to share our process with Video messages and zoom meetings.
In Taipei, it was fascinating to see how many people with very different backgrounds could contribute or relate to the project – and were even excited. It was excellent to be connected to experts like Winston from Taipei and his company AGRIFORWARD working on different levels to use new technology and scientific agricultural knowledge to improve quality and ecology of products like rice – producing excellent products like rice ice receiving highest honours in Taiwan for the outstanding taste due to excellent ingredients and new processes Winston is inventing.
In the final presentations at the end of the week its was once again goo to see how important it is to frame the right questions instead of following immediate assumptions or solutions. The teams did extremely well to come up with (future) scenarios that will be for sure of great value for our work in Cologne until the end of the semester – and it created a shared topic we are planning to proceed our collaboration. More to be seen at the above mentioned KISDspace soon.
And it was an opportunity to connect deeper with our partner school in Taipei and to make plans for the future with the new Chairperson of SCID, Sally Lin.
