"Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself." Chinese Proverb
On January 21st to 23rd the fourth Cirrus Meeting of Teachers took place in Reykjavík, Iceland. Birgitta Nordholm and Niklas Andersson from Umeå Institute of Design participated together with around 50 teachers from Norway, Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, UK, Denmark and Sweden. Both Niklas and Birgitta emphasize the value of these gatherings where you find inspiration and are able to establish an important network.
One of the items of the programme were DIG Equality, Design innovation for gender equality, which was very inspiring and provided a lot of project proposals. A blog was started where everyone can propose lecturers and researchers. Teo Enlund, professor in industrial design at Konstfack, Stockholm told about Karin Ehrnberger, a student who in her degree project switched designs for a kitchen hand blender and an electric screwdriver. You can read her degree project here.
Another item on the programme was Common Master programmes in design. The goal is to increase the collaboration between MA educations in the Scandinavian countries. The dilemmas are that the educations have different regulations, sizes, disciplines and so forth which make it difficult to sync the courses. Niklas Andersson and Tine Kjølsen, from The Danish Design School (communication design) talked about having a joint course item with Oslo National Academy of the Arts (graphic design) in the autumn term 2010.
An example of such collaboration is Master of European Design, where seven universities offer a unique joint programme, called MEDes. Every year about 15 students are accepted to the program.
Sustainability was discussed on the conference, both economical and environmental, and many wanted to save the world, but since that is truly a great task, one could take one step at a time; or as one of the participants said: "We can save someone&s day or experience."
