When they graduate, in the future, these Russian and Chinese students will be required to work with people who do not speak their language. They will be part of a global industry, where they will work with clients from many different parts of the world.
This project aimed to develop the students’ perceptiveness, communication skills and professionalism through requiring them to collaborate with people who they do not usually come into contact with.
The project addressed cultural and geographic difference in the following ways:
- Firstly, the time difference between Moscow and Beijing is 5 hours. Therefore, the project had to be scheduled, organised and worked on every hour of the day, throughout the whole of the week, by somebody in their collective working group across Moscow and Beiijing. Much as a professional designer may work with a client in another time zone.
- Secondly, the students had to address the differences between contemporary Russian and Chinese visual languages.
Students were given a ‘British starting point’, for example, the 'Nutting Girl' jig — a traditional English folk dance. They had to translate the starting point using the visual language of their counterpart (the Russian students applied a Chinese visual language and visa versa). The students were also required to transform the medium of their initial starting point, for example, a dance may become an educational game, an illustration or a typeface but must not remain as a dance.
Last year, the BHSAD Communication Design pathway undertook a similar exercise by collaborating with Escola Britanica de Artes Criativas in São Paulo, Brazil.
