International Collaborative Student Challenge
Lead by:
Dr Malé Luján Escalante (UAL:UK), Dr Carlos Cobreros (Tecnologico de Monterrey: Mexico), Prof. Christine Mortimer (Lancaster University Weihai Campus: China), Prof. Svetlana Matiouk (Macromedia University: Germany)
In co-design and participatory design processes, collaboration is often centred on communication, efficiency, consensus, feasibility or innovation: but what if it’s centred in love?
This challenge is all about love, students in different places and time zones around the world are challenged to design a tool (in the widest sense of the term), that fosters collaboration and/or engagement through the practice of love, not as sentimentality, but as an ethical framework, as an organising principle and as political act for regenerative design.
The tools themselves become a collaborative endeavour, unfolding across different places and times: London (UK), Querétaro (Mexico), Weihai (China), and Cologne (Germany). Tools are developed within a specific context, a specific place and community, while others are carried into new settings, playing, experimenting with, and adapting them for to be used elsewhere. Through this cross-cultural collaboration, students moved through a series of creative and reflexive cycles of tool development and appropriation, allowing them to explore the productive power of love as a guiding force in design practice.
The briefs explored the following frameworks and contexts:
- Utopian Imagination
- Systemic Changemaking in Living Systems
- Ecologies of Care
- ‘All about love: New visions’ by bell hooks
This Challenge is an international collaboration between MA Service Design at London College of Communication, UAL (London, UK), Regenerative Design at Tecnológico de Monterrey (Querétaro, Mexico), UG Business and Management at Lancaster University College x Beijing Jiaotong University (Weihai, China), and UG Design & UG Game Design & Development at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences (Cologne, Germany).
Download the full brief: Here
This initiative was supported by: LCC Research & Knowledge Exchange
