OVERVIEW OF THE PROGRAM

THE VISION OF THE GLOBAL INNOVATION DESIGN PROGRAM is a trans-national education environment that is unparalleled in the world, bringing together three major centers of design, culture and industry: in Europe (Royal College of Art & Imperial College, London), North America (Pratt Institute, New York), and Asia (Keio University, Tokyo/Yokohama). The GID Program has been jointly developed by these four institutions, all recognized as international leaders in creativity and innovation, offering complementary expertise in art, design, engineering, technology and business.

Global Innovation Design is a unique program at the Master's level in which a select group of students are awarded Master's degrees from their home institution, along with a special GID Certificate recognizing participation in this groundbreaking program.

THE GID JOURNEY

GID is an educational platform, a global adventure for emerging young designers to experience the world in a unique multicultural, intellectual, visual, and tactile way. In addition to a "home-base" center in London, Tokyo, or New York, each GID "adventurer" spends a semester at each of the other partner institutions.

This residency is totally immersive in three different cities, each with its own local, global, cultural, economic and human characteristics. The journey is rich in terms of design learning and experience, and a dynamic path toward becoming a powerful and enlightened "global creative catalyst" -- one capable of envisioning and delivering new possibilities for a better world through a multiplex approach to design.

GID INTERNATIONAL PROJECT

OVERVIEW

The International Project is the key symbolic project for GID international collaboration. Students work on globally-distributed teams to research and develop new design concepts and prototypes.


Each year, one wide-spectrum, important and interesting design theme is selected -- a meta theme, e.g. Food, Future of Retail, Health. A key theme for GID is creative leadership. Students' lives will be highly structured during their visits by the curricula offered by each host center. The International Project is thus a primary opportunity for students to cultivate creative leadership, to self-manage their time and teams, and pursue passions of their own definition.


The international project is split into 3 phases:


Launch Sprint. Intensive project to capture students' imaginations and get them quickly up to speed with each other and the year-long meta theme.


Phase 1 - Global Studio. Emphasis on exploratory design research, remote collaboration process, student leadership. Students self-manage a distributed design studio, doing exploratory research projects on the Meta Theme (with coaching by GID faculty). Teams are distributed across the three GID cities. Three-way global collaboration is hard; students must use their creative ingenuity to experiment with different solutions to this problem. 


Phase 2 - Local Market. Local collaborative projects for different markets (US, UK, Japan). Working in local teams, students build on the learnings from Phase 1 to do design work focused on their local city. Remote student interactions become more occasional, serving as opportunities for peer feedback. Emphasis is on cultural study, prototyping, making it real.


SHOWCASE