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Nordic Travels and Work in Maputo
From my lecture in the Reykjavik Art Museum. I see this website is on the screen.I took a quick trip to home fields this September to confer with my people about our work here in Maputo, how the strategy is going, how to change course and what the next steps should be. I also attended the annual Cirrus Conference that took place in Copenhagen this time. I am the leader of the Cirrus Network, which is a network of the majority of Design and Art schools in the Nordic and Baltic countries. That work has given me great pleasure (and obligations) since I really enjoy working for design internationally, especially promoting it as something of value for society and with the other institutes influence national and Nordic design policy, education and research.
I gave lectures in Oslo and Reykjavik about our work in Africa and the establishment of ISAC to make sure that a wider group of people participate in our effort. Surely a larger group has the ability to find wider and diverse possibilities that just the two of us. We have also always considered ourselves as representatives of the networks of designers that we belong to like KHiO, LHÍ, Cirrus and the Cumulus Association. The objective of meeting up with friends in the North was to look out for possibilities of cooperation in the coming very sensitive years for the new school. It pleased me greatly how many came to my presenatations, especially to the Reykjavik lecture and it was fun to meet many friends and participate in discussions about possibilities. Now I have returned to the busy life of getting things further off the ground, participating in the World Wide Views workshop and exhibition that Sóley has been running here and get on with the many tasks of creating strategies for the coming months and years.
Hera Bid Completed
We have been developing a project named SRVD for almost five years now. The seeds of the work came up when I met Lorraine Gamman, a researcher at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design during a conference in Oslo. We were speaking in the same forum about social responsibility and design. Lorraine is the director of Design Against Crime Research Centre in the Innovation Centre at St. Martins and runs projects there with Adam Thorpe, who is the creative director of the same unit. We started talking about how irritated people and thus designers have become of the world as it is, systems, things, environment etc. Their good friend Maziar Raein, who used to work in St. Martins is also a good friend of ours and co-worker in the Oslo National Academy. Together we decided to look into these issues, as very many other designers were also doing at the time as has transpired. I invited them to Oslo for a seminar that we ran to discuss the issues over two days, and then we met on a kind of a regular basis over the years, trying to define what we really meant with social responsibility and then later responsivity. Out of this came our name of SRVD (Socially Responsive Design), an umbrella covering the many projects that want to address such issues. Well, to make a long story short, we have now at last completed the second phase of our research bid to HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, or to be more specific with Alison Clarke in the Papanek Institute there. The research project is named:
How are we being served? Understanding/defining Socially Responsive Design (SRVD) in relation to Social, Economic and Cultural (SEC) Innovation Success in the 21st Century, and reviewing its impact, particularly on the Third Sector.
Now we have to wait until Oct-Nov to find out if our bids becomes successful, but I know that there is stiff competition in the field. What I like is the fact that we have spent lot of time to think and discuss. SRVD does already exist as an umbrella and we are all working under that flag, like for example the DiG-Equality project that we are running now in conjunction with the EDDA program in Iceland that has the sub-name: Center of Excellence in Gender, Equality and Diversity Research.
Fingers crossed
