9. September 2009 by justdanika.

Designing in another country is a great learning experience for foreign designers. First and foremost, all the references that the professors use and the students laugh about, as they are well known towns and products in the Netherlands, I have never seen before. They laugh about a town that “looks classic” but was built quite recently in order to give the same feeling of community as the old towns possess. They joke about a toy that looks like a blob with a face. The term classic is a loosely defined term that’s references differ from culture to culture as much as the language.

I wonder how one might teach design without a filter and what other references should be presented in a class to better prepare the students for global work. In the classes here in Delft, similar to mine at Stanford, they almost never reference design in Asia and if they do it is only in very recent terms. One might reference something of Japan or Korea with reverence but rarely China. China is a culture with a long history of craft. It has emerged more how their design is affected by their culture and history, but students rarely learn about it. Not to mention, how come you never hear about Australia in design?

Currently reading Design Inspired Innovation, it defines a classic design as a long-lived design that anchors and stabilizes the evolution of a firm’s product family. If the purpose of a classic is to give a base-line of what a good design is and classic is defined by culture, it may imply that doing cross-cultural design is the only way to really design for someone else. If you don’t get the culture, you can’t design for them. This I tend to agree with. It also means that students that go abroad to study design, though they may bring back some techniques and tools that can be helpful, they may not have studied their own culture enough to design for it.

With over 40 years of design history at Technical University Delft, it is easy to understand why they think their education system is effective. The program has Alumni that are lead designers at Philips, a CEO at BMW, and entrepreneurs starting companies based on their projects during school. Does this program output very specific types of designers and how will the international students be perceived when they return to their countries? Will they lack the knowledge of how to apply the design process to their own very difference culture? Can they mold the ideology they are taught into something they can utilize and share with others back at home?

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6. September 2009 by justdanika.

I find myself, sitting on this Sunday afternoon, on my tiny porch over looking the rooftops, canals and streets of Amsterdam. It smells like pancakes. The sound of the train, people laughing and a distant bagpipe band makes me smile. It is overcast giving a very European feel to my view with a perfect glaze over the chimneys.

The bike culture is just different here. I walked around the city (looking for somewhere to stop for a Heinekin) enjoying the architecture and the fashion. It is great how everyone from the hipster boys to the older couples are just biking around the streets on their cruisers.

No one here has a 1000 dollar bike (it would just end up in the bottom of the canals). They all bike on these worn out cruisers with oversize handle bars and high seats. Everyone is sitting erect just casually meandering around the streets.

My partner in crime this week, Caroline, mentioned the large number of Harley Davidson bikes and apparel we have seen here. There is a direct correlation to how the Dutch use bicycles and how they use motorcycles.

When you compare these uses to those of the Nor Cal folk who surround me on the streets on Sundays in packs, on bikes that cost more than my car wearing crazy spandex on their way to meet at a coffee shop, it is pretty polar opposite what these people have in mind.

Maybe the real differnce has to do with the difference between what coffee shops sell here and there.

Maybe…

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