The Global Design Studio (GDS): Playing with Trans-National Digital Design Education

The Global Design Studio (GDS) is an online intensive project that introduces students and staff to transnational and transdisciplinary practices and collaboration situated in pluralistic and global ways of designing together whilst exploring subject-driven opportunities for online learning. The project grew out of INTERACT, an academic and student exchange project between four major institutions in Europe and Australia that explored the futures of design in a global context.

The GDS distils the key benefits of INTERACT into a formula that could be scaled to include a greater number of students without the monetary and environmental expense of a physical exchange, making the learning experience more inclusive and accessible. Simultaneously, GDS exposes new, subject-driven opportunities in building global networks for online learning beyond the usual rationale of resource expediency.
The GDS is run in partnership with designer and educator Fred Deakin and Modual (http://www.modual.org) to deliver a transnational immersive learning experience, building on Modual’s track record of delivering learning projects that cross time-zones and national boundaries. The project utilises digital platforms like FUZE and Slack to synchronously and asynchronously connect the sixty students from three participating institutions. The students build relationships, share skills, exercise critical judgement and resource management, and develop a design project together from inception to outcome over the 10-day period of the intensive co-design workshop.

The first iteration, which took taking place from the 3rd of December to the 11th of December 2018, was based on Playable City, an international creative project putting “people and play at the heart of the future city, re-using city infrastructure and re-appropriating smart city technologies to create connections – person to person, person to city” (http://www.playablecity.com). Outcomes took the form of interactive installations and aimed to bring citizens together in specific urban locations. The project brief therefore presented a fruitful counterpoint to the global aspect of the GDS, and participating students had to work both globally and locally.

This all takes place against the backdrop of increased nationalism and protectionism as a response to globalisation and increasing inequality in the countries of the participating institutions. Additionally, it is a response to changing production, dissemination and consumption of designed artefacts when “participating in distributed working has become commonplace for many {…] designers” (Wodehouse, A., et al, 2008). The GDS is an attempt at a subject-driven, modular, agile and digitally-constructed project in which teaching is constructed around contemporary issues rather than traditional disciplinary boundaries or institutional targets to prepare students better for a reality of transdisciplinary and transnational practice. The GDS also wrests control of the online learning discourse from reductive arguments of ‘efficiency’ and place it in terms of experience and opportunity.

This paper will report on the first iteration of the GDS project and propose valuable next steps. Furthermore, the structure of GDS is flexible and adaptable and can be re-created across different institutions, times and contexts – and we would value the opportunity to create further connections around a campfire in Rovaniemi!