DESIGNING GLOBALISATION DESIGN
Year: 2018
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Ahmed Kovacevic, Lyndon Buck, Peter Childs, Stephen Green, Ashley Hall, Aran Dasan
Author: Hall, Ashley; Cheng, Shuxin
Series: E&PDE
Institution: 1: Royal College of Art, United Kingdom; 2: Central Academy of Fine Arts
Section: Asesthetics and Cultural Practice in Design Engineering and Education
Page(s): 476-481
ISBN: 978-1-912254-02-6
Abstract
Designing globalisation design is interdisciplinary experimental design workshop collaboration between the Design Schools at the Royal College of Art in London and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. The workshop developed from a joint desire by the co-authors to bring together insights and experiences from teaching cross-cultural design led innovation, design research from a series of publications on design and globalisation, and strategic commercial design consulting experiences for mass manufacturers. Globalisation is often considered to be a transnational issue that is distant from day-to-day design practices and although there is some awareness of the issues, these are rarely tackled and taught as specific methods in design schools. The aims of the workshop were to explore; if postgraduate design students could bridge the gap between the phenomenon of globalisation and their own design practice, bring to life new design concepts that illuminate the possibilities of socio-cultural impact from receiving and exporting globalised and localised designs that tackle globalisation issues, and to explore if different design approaches to global issues emerge from within or across different design disciplines and cultures. The workshop that took place in Beijing in the autumn of 2017 had 26 postgraduate participants who were engaged through lectures, tutorials and workshop activities. Through comparative analysis and case studies our results highlight different perspectives from design disciplines and illustrate the potential to engage students in tangible design outputs that connect globalisation concerns with design methods that can create products that tackle some of the opportunities and issues. We discovered a variety of approaches to tackling cultural influence with some embracing the opportunities of more ubiquitous mass-produced products while others focussed on localising solution or enhancing the ability of minority cultures to resist or exploit globalising technologies and markets. We believe this research makes a contribution to design education approaches for tackling globalisation and illustrates that design students can appreciate both the potential for design projects to have global impact and understand their agency in this context.
Keywords: Globalisation, design methods, interdisciplinary, cross-culture, design innovation