THE INTERCULTURAL DESIGN CAMP – A COLLABORATIVE ADVENTURE IN DEVELOPING INTERDISCIPLINARY PEDAGOGY AND “INTERNATIONALIZATION”

The InterCultural Design Camp is an innovative collaboration, which also represents an important developmental stage in the evolving relationships of a group of European higher education institutions coming to terms with the realities and demands of “internationalization” and interdisciplinarity. There are currently four partner institutions: University College Arteveldehogeschool, Ghent; Stuttgart Media University; Linköping Institute of Technology, Sweden; and the University of the West of Scotland.
The project developed from a period of collaboration and consultation on the development of a larger scale joint post-graduate programme. This gave rise to interesting proposals, which met some stumbling blocks in terms of funding and compatibility of systems. It was decided to adopt a more proactive philosophy and use a brief intensive collaboration as a means of testing and “kickstarting” the collaboration. Accordingly, the first Intercultural Design Camp was established in September 2009 at Münsingen a former military camp in the Swabian mountains, now a unique environmental site where Stuttgart Media University has a base. Challenges included the cultural differences, methods of thought and working practices of students from different countries - but perhaps just as importantly, different disciplines. Digital Art students from Scotland, Graphic Design & Communication students from Sweden and Information Design, Print and Media Publishing students from Germany had surprisingly different ideas of how to respond to the relatively open brief and had to develop effective ways of working together in international, interdisciplinary project teams.
The process was as important as the product – in this case cross-media projects addressing and embodying aspects of intercultural communication. While the students got to know one another in enforced proximity, staff was able to observe other teaching styles and discover more about their partner institutions’ organisational approaches.
What emerged from this pilot project was a clear sense that this brief but intensive collaboration – within the context of longer established institutional relationships – has lasting benefits and has already acted as an effective catalyst for further innovative developments in learning and teaching within the individual institutions and between institutions. A measure of the success of the Design Camp is the increased willingness of students to move to undertake ERASMUS exchanges - rather than requiring a ‘leap of faith’, students are going to work with people they already know. One student was able to develop work for their Honours Creative Project from the Münsingen experience.
The pilot assisted greatly in the success of a bid for funding from the EU for an intensive course, which will come into play in 2011 with the Design Camp in Sweden. The methodology of the Design Camp has also informed the development of the collaborative modules at UWS which have in turn assisted in the development of the Design Camp 2010.
The range of direct and indirect reciprocal benefits this collaborative model offers is assessed, including opportunities for developing staff research collaborations on practice-based and pedagogical research with continuing analysis of practitioner output and the student experience. The consolidation of the Intercultural Design Camp and potential expansion of the network will be considered.