First taste of the Designskolen Kolding
During the past 2 months I have had the pleasure of working within a team of international students on a real project in collaboration with the Kolding Hospital. I will briefly introduce myself so you can understand where my thoughts are coming from. My name is Dimitry Galamiyev; I am an exchange student from Toronto, Canada, and currently enrolled in the Industrial Design programme at Design School Kolding.
As I arrived in Denmark in early January, I immediately began with the first course of the semester; Welfare Design. On the first day of the course, I got the chance to meet the other exchange students that have decided to be a part of the exchange programme and study Industrial Design in Kolding. Luckily, we all spoke English and were able to communicate with our Danish classmates and mentors without any problems.
During the first week of the course, our entire class was given a tour of the Kolding Hospital and was shown many of the problems that the hospital was hoping to solve through design! I was absolutely amazed about this opportunity and the relationship between the school and the Kolding Hospital. We were accommodated as professional industrial designers, were able to see the problems first hand, and initiate contact with the staff in the corresponding departments. After the tour we were given the freedom to choose the department we wanted to work with. Myself, along with the other three exchange students (Alexis Turron, Timmy O’Sullivan, and Jorge Porthoz) decided to join forces and tackle the hospital’s unavoidable way-finding problem. We all went through quite the eventful way-finding process ourselves while we were trying to settle into Denmark and felt that our diverse experiences and backgrounds would provide a vast amount of insights for this problem.
To further understand the hospital’s current way-finding experience we were scheduled a lunch meeting with some of the hospital executives. Let me pause for a second and explain how amazing this lunch was (and I am not just referring to the free food). First of all, throughout my three years of studying in university, no other company/organization took the initiative to invite the students for a private meeting to discuss the project, let alone be offered to do this over lunch (win-win opportunity for starving students)!
During our conversation, we were able to have an actual break down about our role within this project and what the desired end result should be. I found this part of the course extremely crucial and beneficial. Unlike all of the other school projects that I have been involved with in the past, there was never a two-way dialogue with the students and the “client”. Most often, whatever company is working with the university usually serves as a framework for the professor to design a course around. As a result, the students are stuck designing for problems and experiences that are derived from their own imagination instead of being directly outlined and discussed by the “client”.
Over the next few weeks we stayed in close touch with the hospital while designing the new and improved way-finding system. Many sticky notes were spent, cups of coffees brewed, and hours of sleep shortened.
On February 28th over fifty hospital staff and various professionals were invited to participate in a design workshop and take the time to observe the solutions that were made by our class. Each group had seven minutes to pitch their solution, answer questions, and receive feedback. This event turned out to be another excellent part of the project. Each solution was given specialized exposure and an opportunity to make contacts with relative industry professionals that would be interested in perusing the idea beyond the walls of the school.
Although our school project came to an end, our intentions of making this project a reality did not. Following the final presentation we were given an opportunity to further collaborate with the hospital and make our idea come to life.
For the extra curious, below are a couple of articles writen about us and this project by Tina Glinvad Polat (Kommunikation, Sygehus Lillebælt).