Student report on the DesignCamp 2010 – “Design Thinking at its Best Practice”
In addition to the pictures they brought back home with them, Angela and Amrei wrote a short report about the DesignCamp:
Design Thinking at its Best Practice
“We (Angela Haas, Amrei Kellner) had the great opportunity to go to the Design Camp 2010 as representatives of Pforzheim University. Kolding School of Design invited 21 interdisciplinary students from some of the world’s best universities for two weeks to Denmark to work on the theme: “New Ways of Transportation” with a strong emphasis on public transport in the region of Kolding, Denmark.
The camp started with a very intense kick off. Barnabas Wetton from the Kolding School of Design and Cordy Swope from IDEO gave a very good lecture, which introduced us to the design process.
To cope with different backgrounds and cultures we were given a very clear framework, which had a great impact on the groupwork and process. We had a lot of fun thinking, learning and creating new concepts. During the camp we had additional lectures about new materials and colors from Professor Hilary Dalke and Jakki Dehn from Kingston University, London. Professor Michael Braungart gave an outstanding lecture about “cradle to cradle”. The first step was to define a clear challenge related to new ways of transportation. The “How might we…” questions made it possible to go through the design process without losing the main group goal. In addition we defined success criteria to recheck our work and to get a high-flying output. The whole time there were teachers from the school available to support us. We were impressed how they gave us great feedback and always encouraged and enabled us to take the direction we thought was best. For example by organizing materials that we needed to make good prototypes and by helping us when problems arised.
To sum it up, in the Design Camp we were directed how to use design thinking at it’s best practice. The given structure and code of behavior made it possible to get a great output from intercultural and interdisciplinary students from all over the world with a high fun potential. We had a wonderful time there and made a lot of new friends. Thanks for for sending us!
Amrei and Angela”
