Cross-culturality, interdisciplinarity, and globalisation in design education

Introduction Carlos: I met Regine, Catherine, Anka, and Tatiana for the first time in 2014, at the launching of the Cultural Spaces and Design project in Australia. On their subsequent visit to Australia my former colleague and good friend Lisa and I presented some of the joint experiences we had gained during the five years we organised study tours for our Australian students to Singapore, Japan, and China. Just before our 2017 study tour to Singapore, I travelled to Basel for the final symposium of the Cultural Spaces and Design project and participated in fantastic workshops, meeting great people, students and professors from around the globe. Especially memorable were the trips to the river to swim and float downstream with the current, and as an industrial designer, I was intrigued by the beautiful, functional, and unique fish-shaped floating devices! One of my students at the time, Millie, who was developing her honours project on the role of women in Australian Industrial Design, also joined us and benefited from this fantastic experience. In this text, we would like to discuss the topics of cross-culturality, multi- and interdisciplinarity, and globalisation in design education. We want to start with personal reflections about our journeys as designers and educators travelling around the world, studying and working in different countries, and how being exposed to different cultures changed our perception of the world, our professional disciplines, and our ideas about education. Subsequently, we discuss our teaching experiences together, especially through a series of study tours conducted initially with graphic and industrial design students, and which scaled up to include more than 80 students from five different institutions. Finally, we will offer some conclusions.