Hasta La Ideas

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pa href=”http://colab.syr.edu/”COLAB/a (Collaboration Laboratory) is a groundbreaking a href=”http://www.syr.edu/”Syracuse University/a (SU) initiative that connects students, communities and corporations, to bridge gaps, create opportunities and solve some of today’s top social, economical and environmental crises. We facilitate visual thinking and collaborative practices through what we’ve termed serious play. /p

pWe believe this is an effective, relevant and critical model for education, with the potential to be utilized and nurtured on a broader academic level to encourage effective collaboration. While there are many initiatives that address similar themes (the a href=”http://dschool.stanford.edu/”d.school at Stanford/a, a href=”http://www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/”Hellen Hamlyn Centre/a at The Royal College of Art), COLAB is the first program of this kind that we know of. This means we don’t have a lot of precedent and have started from scratch on many platforms. We want to share our story, the things we’ve learned and the way we work, with you, in the hopes of seeing more programs like this in the future, and more opportunities to work with like-minded organizations or corporations./p

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pemGarth Robert’s AdHoc workspace at COLAB. Bottom: Students at COLAB’s Social Media Charrette./em/p

pWhile COLAB is new, the idea of COLAB is not new, it has been a conversation since the 1960s. a href=”http://www.idsa.org/absolutenm/templates/?a=4835″Arthur Pulos/a, former a href=”http://www.idsa.org/”IDSA/a president and then chair of SU’s department of design, pushed the idea that design should act as a bridge across disciplines and across colleges within the academy. He believed that design needs other disciplines in order to be most successful. “The student learns under the stimulus of the interplay of all of the disciplines, that education is more than the mere acquisition of knowledge and skills, that it is rather concerned with developing that intuitive sense of structure of the various disciplines which will help them become self-propelled during a lifetime of exposure to new learning experiences.” /p

pSyracuse University has finally realized Pulos’ vision./p

div class=”article_quote” COLAB believes that examining collaboration at an educational level is key to saving it from dying in buzzword hell, next to its friend “green.” /div

pI arrived at COLAB last August, after months of conversation with Chris McCray, COLAB’s executive director, who, to put things in context, has a foot-long ZZ Top beard; self-designed, handmade aluminum glasses; and can sell ice to a penguin. The space was not finished. There was a list of projects a mile long and a lot of hard work to do. But, there was also a clear vision and a lot of heart./p

pOur mission statement reads: COLAB is a creative space for the exploration of complex issues in a multidisciplinary environment. At COLAB diverse talents and visions intersect to engage wicked problems and implement responsible solutions, while fostering future leaders in innovation./p

pA shift to collaborative practices has been apparent in creative fields for some time, especially in big consultancy firms like IDEO and Continuum, where teams of anthropologists, designers and engineers work together on everything from product and systems design to rebranding and strategy. Specialties are also shifting–borders between graphic, product, system and interaction designers are blurring. In the best case, this results in original, dynamic, innovative work. In the worst, muddy work that’s imprecise and difficult to evaluate. /pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/colab_a_laboratory_for_collaboration_and_serious_play_by_shoham_arad__16513.asp”(more…)/a
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