CIRRUS REACH
1. Cirrus Policy. The main purpose is to sustain a global powerhouse in design through education and research in the Nordic-Baltic region. And to pay attention to the specialities that strengthen design, crafts, arts and innovation in the region. The network promotes Nordic-Baltic cooperation between the member institutions through staff, student and researcher’s exchange, intensive projects, symposia, meeting points, transfer of knowledge activities, workshops.
2. Reach is such an activity, where opposite partner students will meet and help with reaching goals and ideas for common strategies. The workshop will look at what is common and what are the differences. How does innovation and design have universals and what are local specialities? How can REACH help determine what is Nordic-Baltic?
3. Innovation includes four basic factors:
R&D
sophisticated users
factor conditions
competition.
The Nordic-Baltic region wants to improve conditions for innovation and global competitiveness. The same is the strategy of all the institutes in Cirrus. The network has many acting elements to define and map the conditions for this. Most of the search is academic and well developed, happens in conferences, in scientific papers, high level meetings through dialogue of professors and professional actors.
4. Dialogue. This project wants to include a different dimension to the dialogue, one that is often ignored, but the Cirrus institutes have good access to. The opinions and future perspectives of young people in innovation and the creative fields. Similarly, there are geographical power locations for creative innovation, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Stockholm etc. What is the perspective from further afar in the region?
5. Reach wants to run an exercise in seeking opinions and policy advice from young people from the edges of the region. A workshop is to be held in the Iceland Cirrus member academy with the annual Meeting of Teachers in June 2012. There, young students from the edges, Iceland, Greenland, Lithuania and Latvia will meet up and go through dialogue exercises to create opinions about the region, how it reaches from edge to edge, find common grounds and differences.
6. The workshop will deliver a report in form of presentation and website to open up a dialogue about the future of the region, its relationship to global issues, sustainability and hopefully can come up with some advice to policy makers, teachers of design and art and curriculum program developers. The platform framework questions put forward will be those of the Nordic Council of Ministers Reports. There is a need for young opinions and policy advice.
7. Facilitators.
- Jóhannes Þórðarson, (dean and architect/planner) Iceland Academy of the Arts.
- Lotta Kvist, Designer MFA, Head of Dept. HDK School of Design and Crafts, Sweden.
- Halldór Gíslason, professor, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway; leader of Cirrus.
8. Program. After an other Cirrus workshop in Iceland named: Local Holistic Sustainability in the Progress of Global Reality? a few days will be spent in the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik. The work will include reporting and socializing with the academy.
Student participants will be selected from five edge schools in Cirrus. Exercises in dialogue and decision making takes place all days, reaching conclusions as recommendations to the Cirrus institutes. All operations will be posted on website and presented to member schools. Participation demands are that the students are students of design in their Cirrus institutes and speak English.
9. Plan of workshop. During the previous workshop in Iceland, some of the same students participate during the week before and occasionally touch on edge conditions issues.
Weekend 9th and 10th of June after previous Cirrus workshop, Dori Gislason explains the search and asks for creative and active positions from all students. This weekend is also the final graduation day of the Iceland Academy and students are invited there to meet all local students and academy.
Monday 11th June, workshop all day, dialogue and proposals. Tuesday 12th June workshop all day and dialogue. Wednesday 13th June, conclusion and return home Thursday 14th.
Report and results posted spontaneously on web links from the Cirrus website made available to all partner schools and open on internet. This results in direct communication to all Cirrus partner schools and will be reported to the meeting of Cirrus heads and teachers in the autumn.
November 22, 2012
Posted in: DESIGN, ICELAND
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