Greetings,
For the past 3 months I've been traveling at a rather high speed through several cities in India as well as Hong Kong and Beijing. Aside from relishing in the local culinary delicacies, one of my goals for visiting these locations is to ultimately develop a series of online exchange projects between communication design students I will be working with at U Buffalo and visual communication students in emerging economic centers. As both China and India strive to compete in the visual landscape for brand identity I feel it is critical to establish relationships amongst young visual communicators. As future "legitimized" communicators, students involved in such programs need to continually re-evaluate both their process and product in order to maintain an ethical practice. The inherent structure of the web, its potential for myriad architectures and systems of interfacing, lends itself to this form of inquiry. In conjunction with the inevitable challenges of cross-cultural translation/interpretation, I hope students participating in an international, online collaborative project will realize the impact of their role and responsibility in representations of local and global. Another part of this project is to introduce and/or further encourage open source into the design community- a movement of which I lack much knowledge about but am invested in learning more.
So on that rather optimistic note, I look forward to being more present on the list (probably not for another few weeks) and to comments surrounding this topic.
Cheers,
Stephanie