London is one of the most exciting and vibrant capitals in the world. It is the dynamic hub of the United Kingdom's creative and cultural industries providing an exceptional creative and intellectual environment in which to live and work alongside some of the most eminent artists, designers, intellectuals and business people. It is a place where high culture meets street culture, a city where opera, theatre and some of the world's finest museums rub happily alongside an exuberant underground creative scene. GID students will be based at the heart of the capital at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London's Kensington campuses, joining highly multicultural and distinguished communities of practising artists and designers. Students will experience fantastic opportunities to be inspired and challenged by the creative energy of a leading international European city - a perfect environment in which to innovate masterfully, ask questions, gain a unique point of view and emerge as an inspired future agent of change.

New York is the preeminent city of culture in the United States and surely one of the greatest cities in the world. As a center of business and the arts, with a colorful history and a remarkably diverse population, New York galvanizes the talents of artists and architect, designers and musicians, filmmakers and writers. What is more, New York graduates more than twice the number of students of design and architecture as any other US city, making the academic, professional and social environment vibrant with young energy. The lively atmosphere of New York is complemented by the emergence of Brooklyn as a parallel haven for artists and designers, not to mention its manufacturing base and performance venues. Pratt, with campus locations in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, and with so many notable alumni in all creative fields, is perfectly positioned to add a crucial component of inspiration to future GID design explorers.

Tokyo and Yokohama are adjacent cities that constitute the greater Tokyo megalopolis. Tokyo is the driving force of Asia's creative and cultural industries, including design, arts, and entertainment. Tokyo enjoys the contrast of old and new, with traditional Japanese culture co-existing alongside contemporary pop culture. In addition, Japan is home to cutting-edge technology innovation in electronics, robotics, gadgets, and high-speed networks. GID-Tokyo is an ideal location for immersive experience in fast-paced technological innovation, blended with perfected design and creative movements.

Centred within the heart of London, the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London sit side by side within the cultural hub of Albertopolis in South Kensington. Born from the Great Exhibition of 1851 both institutes have strong links to both the past as well as forging their way into the future through ground breaking art, design, creativity and research.

Global Innovation Design is part of the School of Design at the Royal College of Art. The school's programmes range from the highly conceptual to the deeply practical and share a strong culture of experimentation, innovation and debate within differing approaches and curricula. Their shared aim is to provide a dynamic and vibrant environment that encourages risk and originality, diversity in thinking, opinions and ideologies. The School engages with design on multiple levels: as a cultural and societal activity and as an innovation process where design can deliver new products, new services and new ways of running or creating businesses - or even new ways of doing business.

Imperial has one of the largest and most advanced mechanical engineering departments in the world. It has a long-standing and well-established international reputation for the quality of its research for which it was awarded the highest rating in the most recent Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. The Department ensures that the resulting research developments impact upon its teaching, so that taught courses remain stimulating and relevant. It has approximately 47 members of academic staff; eight research staff and 160 research students working towards MPhil or PhD degrees. The Department is one of the most active in research and one of the most successful in gaining funds for research from government, industry and charities. The Design Engineering Group within the Department of Mechanical Engineering specialises on research in engineering design, design process, decision rationale, creativity tools and design applications. Insights from this research will be applied in the implementation of the GID degree.

Keio University was Japan's first institute of higher learning, formed as a school for Western studies (Rangaku) in 1858 in Edo, present-day Tokyo, by founder Yukichi Fukuzawa. Since the school's inception, students of Keio have risen to the forefront of innovation in every imaginable academic field, emerging as social and economic leaders.

Keio University's Graduate School of Media Design, known as Keio Media Design (or KMD in short) was established in 2008 to educate creative global leaders to work on the global stage, building and running new industries for the coming "creative society." We invent new media for human experience, creating content and services through international collaborations among industry, academia and government. We imagine a world where the driving force of the economy is creativity rather than productivity or efficiency. Our goal is to develop students into "media innovators" who combine the four creativities of design, technology, management, and policy to drive global innovation.

The Industrial Design Department at Pratt Institute earned its pre-eminence through a long history of development of principles and techniques of design education established at the time that the profession itself was being invented. And now, with the expansion of the industrial design field into the ancillary directions of marketing, branding and strategy, and the appearance of many new tools and materials, social networking and concerns of sustainability, new generations of young designers are inventing their own perceptions of life and the future, opening a period of creativity with new principles, processes and aesthetics.

As Pratt celebrates its 125th anniversary, our mission remains constant: the intelligent and creative translation of ideas into form - with all the implications that the notion of translation (both linguistic and visual) brings with it. This translation is a daily occurrence in virtually every studio in the MID program, as through hands-on projects and critique students begin to master the language of design, with classes in color theory and its application; advanced notions of form-making and aesthetics, for which Pratt ID is renowned; CAD and prototype classes that show how media affect the translation process; the relation of real and virtual design spaces; new materials and sustainable methods of production; and finally professional practice and business, input from guest speakers, competitions, sponsored projects and field trips that connect the academic machinery of the department to the needs and perceptions of the outside world. In this process of translation of ideas into form, Pratt ID is an ongoing success story, and a special concern of the program's alliance with GID is to maintain leadership in the field of design and to raise design education to the highest possible plane.