Read Claudia Wondratschke's(Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft) review of Sustainable Design Lab's Kick Off event and where the Lab is heading in the coming months.
In 2015, the United Nations committed to 17 global goals for a better future. One of them is goal number 11, and its message comes across quite clear: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.
The Sustainable Design Lab is to be understood as a contribution to move a little closer towards this goal. To make it happen, we collaborate with Creative Ports, home of the Cultural and Creative industries (CCI) in the Baltic Sea region. Its humble goal: Working together to unlock the internationalisation potential of creatives in the Baltic Sea region through a variety of different programs. The Sustainable Design Lab is jointly hosted by 3 Creative Ports Partners: Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft, Danish Cultural Institute in Riga and South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk).
The Lab itself is a platform, where ideas can be explored, tested and implemented with talents from different design disciplines and different countries of the Baltic Sea region. Throughout the program we encourage the participants to experience new ways of working with skilled designers outside their bubble and to develop their own ideas in an inspiring environment.
Moreover, the participants will be working in circular design workshops led by experts and learn more about design markets in different countries.
Over the course of 3 months, 3 different digital workshops and informal activities will be held with hosts in Hamburg/Germany, Mikkeli/Finland and Riga/Latvia. At the closing event in June, the results will be presented to a virtual audience.
We started virtually on 19th and 20th March with a Kick Off in Hamburg, Germany.After a short introduction to Creative Ports and the project, at the beginning everything was about getting to know each other, that means 16 designers from 3 participating cities, our facilitator Torben Lohmüller (Darkhorse) and the Creative Ports partners from Hamburg, Mikkeli and Riga.
In the next step, we started exploring the challenges and best practices of sustainable urban development in Riga, Mikkeli and Hamburg through 3 video presentations, a keynote presentation (by Niels Boeing about FabCity Concept) and followed by inspiring discussions.
After a short break Frances Uckermann (Head of designxport Hamburg) gave a very interesting introduction to Hamburg’s design market and our facilitator Torben followed with an introduction to Circular Thinking and what it can do for cities, including a short circular design sprint. At the end of our first weekend, the participants worked together on the mapping of potential topics to work with and decided to split up in two major groups with the rough working titles of “Greening the city” and “Next City Center”.
Next station will be virtual Mikkeli on 7th & 8th of May. Meanwhile the teams have been working together via Slack and in self organized working groups. On our second weekend we will try to focus more on the specific ideas and get directly into the prototyping. There will be much more to tell after the next weekend!
Following dates and closure of the lab will take place on 10 June and the final event on 11 June.
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