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K2 Winter School, entitled ‘Designing Future Cities’, was held in Kyushu University, Fukuoka in Japan.

The director was Bryan Boyer, who has conducted many urban innovation projects such as Strategic Design Lead at Sitra and project manager at the Helsinki Design Lab. The Winter School is an overarching platform of sharing different views and cultures with participants from various backgrounds.

Students from Kyushu University, id KAIST from Korea, IIllinois Institute of Technology, California College of the Arts, Royal College of Art, TU Delft and Aalto University joined with industry partners from Hitachi, TOYOTA, QUANTUM, Sony and Fukuoka Electric Power to reimagine our collective futures.

From Aalto University, Nayoung Yoon, Master’s student of IDBM (International Design Business Management) at the School of Business, participated.

‘Designing Future Cities’ was divided into 6 teams according to the themes– Home, Mobility, Community, Learning, Work, Peace of Mind. Each group was posed an ambitious challenge: ‘Design Fukuoka 2030’', Nayoung Yoon explains.

For instance, Work team, where Nayoung participated in, consisted of Japanese, Brazilian, Russian, and Korean students from Design, Engineering, Sound design, Industrial design, and Business. By synthesizing the disparate experience and knowledge, Work team developed a public service named “Skills Grid”: an interactive platform that collects, analyses and broadcasts  information about the skill set of the users, based on their own location.

The Winter School reached its climax at the K2 Symposium 2017: Designing Future Cities, an international symposium open to the general public. The results of all teams were unveiled and discussed with panels.

'In addition to the workshop outcomes, insightful topics about innovation, such as the dynamics of innovation, design 3.0, today’s problem solving approach and cities as design power stations in the global innovation chain, were also presented and discussed by the panels', Nayoung Yoon concludes.

The symposium was held in February.

The core offering of International Design Business Management (IDBM) master's programme includes an eight-month long learning-by-doing (embedding both practice and project-based learning) industry project with a real-life business enterprise setting. This year there are 11 teams with 9 industry partners. At the end, student teams will develop innovative products, services and business concepts.