While many had their eyes trained on the outcome of the last day at COP15, my eyes were reviewing final project submissions from the recent batch of students at Shanghai’s Raffles Design Institute.
A school dedicated to all things design, this class of students was coming from the communications department and were charged with taking an existing brand and developing a nee message for them. A message of sustainability.
For me it was an interesting exercise as I had just wrapped up my own class, and 2 weeks of s sustainability bootcamp, and the projects I was reviewing at Raffles were complimentary to the work my own class had been doing. In fact many of the projects involved the same product classes.
Unlike my students thought, who were focused on developing issue, stakeholder, and regulatory maps, these students were focused on a single branded product, and quite often one that was in existence, and what was interesting to see was that I was able to see behind the communications process as these students researched the issues, sketched out their ideas, and developed entirely new branded messages to fit their angle (see this poster as an example).
It was another afternoon where the power and need for developing student capacity was needed, and that once engaged the students would match their passion for an issue with their talent.