K2 - Asian Laboratory for Design-Driven Innovation

In January 2017, the Kyushu University Faculty of Design collaborated with South Korea’s id KAIST, known as a world-class design school for science and technology, to start the K2 Design Lab.
As the debut of this project, the international “K2 Symposium 2017: Designing Future Cities” was held at the Kyushu University Ohashi campus in Fukuoka on the final day of the “K2 Winter School 2017” held from February 13th to 18th.

The K2 Winter School welcomed partner businesses like Hitachi, Toyota, and Kyushu Electric Power, and invited leading and highly accomplished urban designer Bryan Boyer as director, on the theme of “Designing Future Cities.”
The program worked with this theme recruiting students from world-class universities like Kyushu University, KAIST, Aalto University in Finland, the Royal College of Art in the UK, and Stanford University in the US, as well as participants from companies. The program was conducted primarily in English.
Furthermore, California College of the Arts professor Barry Katz and KAIST professor Kunpyo Lee were invited as keynote speakers for the symposium, offering their thoughts on how urban innovation is generated.

By working together on the K2 Design Lab, KAIST and Kyushu University use the extensive networks of both universities, gathering excellent talent from around the world in an international environment, and provide new, as yet unseen frameworks in which industry, government, and academia work in cooperation.

This K2 Winter School’s experimental effort will, in the future, as the K2 Design Lab, create creative spaces that attract active talent from all around the world, cultivate talent that can flourish internationally, and will aim to generate innovation talent through practical and experimental projects, and continue and develop these activities.