Shanghai Open Design workshop
Waag BY

Hack a Dutch Design, please

“Hack a Dutch Design!” is the invitation of our concept developer Astrid van Roij-Lubsen to the Chinese students of Tongji University, department of  Design & Innovation. With this challenge, Waag and Willem de Kooning Academie (WdKA) kicked off the workshop on Open Design at the Radical Design Week in Shanghai.

During the week students from different backgrounds, from architecture to digital media design and from software engineering to environmental and industrial design get an introduction in the emerging field of Open Design. The full-week course will be filled with lectures (on authorship, production, Creative Commons) and making (sketching, prototyping, digital fabrication). The aim of the workshop is to understand the principles of Open Design, explore different tools and methods and reflect upon Open Design and the students’ future role as an Open Designer. Daringly, the Chinese students have been asked to hack a design of students of the Willem de Kooning Academie. So, since Open Design is about making, sharing, re-using, and remixing, this is exactly what the students will do. They will adapt the designs of the Dutch WdKA students who’ve made these as part of an elective module.

Background information
Tongji University, Waag and Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam organize a one-week pressure cooker workshop on Open Design. The workshop will take place during the Radical Design week from October 29th to November 2nd at the Tongji University in Shanghai. Students will get to know the principles, tools and methods of Open Design through participating in the Open Design contest. On November 2nd the winners will be announced.