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.
The Shared Campus Inaugural Conference and Launch at ZHdK was a good opportunity to share insights and experiences from the transcultural collaboration program that ZHdK is running for some years that now led to the “Shared Campus” platform. As they were announcing, it should be established as a new collaboration platform for international education formats, research networks, joint productions and services.
Shared Campus is based on the idea of sharing interests, competencies, resources and infrastructures, with the aim of building up collective knowledge, discussing relevant issues and enabling long-distance creative exchanges.
The seven participating schools are: City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media // Hong Kong Baptist University, Kyoto Seika University // LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore // Taipei National University of the Arts // University of the Arts London – Central Saint Martins // Zurich University of the Arts. As Lasalle and UAL – Central Saint Martins are also partners in the GDI program co-founded by KISD, it was a good opportunity to exchange meet partners and discuss about different profiles and perspectives for profiles. In the same way it was good to talk to colleagues not only from the Shared Campus platform, but also to colleagues from related disciplines.
The range of the contributions was transdisciplinary at its best. I was in particular impressed by the panel discussion about Co-creating with Nonhuman Others
with Heather Barnett (UK) and Zheng Bo (Taiwan). Heather Barnett Since has been working for more than 10 years with the true slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, observing and influencing its growth patterns, navigational abilities and seemingly human behaviours. Used as a model organism in diverse scientific studies, the single cell organism is attributed with a primitive form of intelligence, problem solving skills and the ability to anticipate events. It is also quite beautiful, the dendritic patterns reminiscent of forms seen at varying scales within nature, from blood vessels to tree branches, from river deltas to lightening flashes.(see also https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/the-physarum-experiments/).
She pointed also to a very impressive example (2010) showing that slime mould is able in 26 hours to grow a network just like Tokyo rail system (see https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/).
In her collective experiment “Being Other Than We Are… Playing with Perspective Shifts and Nonhuman Subjectivities” Heather Barnett challenged a group to experience very basic but impressive capacities for communication and cooperation. This allowed very interesting insights and led not only to constructive discussion, but also to the opportunity to feel relations, patterns and aspects of networks of actors.
A keynote of Audrey Tang, Digital Minister of Taiwan (https://twitter.com/audreyt), showed a powerful perspective of Social Innovation supporting democratic process, commoning and sharing.
The exhibition of the student works – currently dealing with the situation in HongKong was discussed during the days with the participants, many of them coming from HK as well. It becomes more and more obvious that working together in teams from different cultures and countries and exposing oneself to local contexts is a prerequisite for critical reflection and the synthesis of own positions and transformations in art and design. Nevertheless, is nearly impossible to understand the powers, axes and agents in the complex systems, so a simple for / against or black/white is not only not sufficient, but may affect the situation in an irreversible progression. Discussing and critically reflecting this is crucial and was possible in the context of the conference.
So this is just an extract and I did not have the opportunity to attend all sessions – but thank you and congratulations to Daniel Späti, Chair Project Team Shared Campus and Nuria Krämer, Program Development!
