2018 International Collaboration Workshop at Beijing Institute of Technology

An international collaboration workshop and lectures were held at the Beijing Institute of Technology, School of Art and Design, in China.

Thirty-five masters students participated in the workshop, and the students experienced how workshops are run in Japan, the ways to ideate, and how to conduct presentations.

In the workshop, the students were split into six groups, to generate ideas based on the theme “Carry”, and gave a presentation at the end. There were many questions raised, and students are actively engaged in group discussion.

Around 150 students from the School of Art and Design, Beijing Institute of Technology, participated in the lectures held during the workshops. Three teaching staff from the Design Strategy department from the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, gave lectures on design thinking, public design and sharing of their own areas of expertise.

【Program】
12/11　Briefing of assignment, survey
13/11　Survey, generating ideas, intermediate presentation, lectures by Associate Professor Sugimoto and Associate Professor Sogabe
14/11　Developing concept, preparation for the presentation
15/11　Preparation for the presentation, final presentation
16/11　Lecture by Professor Morita

From this workshop, we can see the improvement in the skills of Chinese students. It also allowed the teaching staff at our faculty gained a better understanding of the differences between the Japanese and Chinese design education and the strengths and weaknesses of the students. These understandings will help us to conduct future workshops with a better synergy of mixed teams of Japanese and Chinese students.

At the end of the workshop, the Beijing Institute of Technology expressed interest to continue the short-term workshops and to conduct international industry-academia collaboration classes.

In future, we will be using this approach, to conduct other workshops at the various Chinese universities, such as Shenzhen University.

We will continue to contribute to to the development of Design Study in Asia.