IdeaSquare brought its Journal of Experimental Innovation at the International Design Factory Week 2022
The International Design Factory Week 2022 was hosted this October at the Future Design Factory in Leeuwarden, Netherlands.
During this annual event, all the design factories across the globe meet, to discuss projects and plan for future collaboration, getting energy from one another and planning for the year to come. IdeaSquare brought its indexed Journal of Experimental Innovation (CIJ) as a project, planning for future research, collaborations, and special issues.
Catarina Batista was there to present the journal, attend workshops, and discuss how we use challenge-based innovation in our Educational programmes at IdeaSquare. She shared the knowledge we accumulated here at the innovation space at CERN, and brought CIJ as a project. The goals were to communicate about it, reflect on how to improve it, and also to plan for future collaboration and papers.
You meet, you have these chances to showcase what you have been doing. You have slots for project planning, so you can come up with an idea or a collaboration project, or anything like that. You pitch it, you see who is interested, and then together with others, you have different slots to work on those ideas and to participate in others' projects as well. So for example I brought CIJ as a working topic, but I also attended other sessions from other people that wanted to create mentorship training, or that wanted to create a network for mentors around the world.
Alongside the International Design Factory Week, a conference called DFGN.R is organized. Educators, designers and experts in design research could share their insights and inspire others on education, methods, practices and ecosystems of co-creation and innovation. CIJ will then serve as the outlet for the selected articles from this year's conference and for next year's as well.
I learned a lot about how we can improve CIJ, understanding how to position it more meaningfully for the network. [...] We already got people interested to be reviewers and to drive special issues. So, in terms of research, it was actually quite important to just push it forward and have a bit more people integrated.
This week is also a place to brainstorm on Design Thinking and education and to collect new ideas for the Educationnal programme. And even more: this is an important time to meet other members of the network, share experiences, and get motivated.
I learned different ways of implementing the Substainable Development Goals into our practices, and researching the capacities and capabilities of students. So I got really inspired to try to infuse what I've seen into our programmes.
Photograph: Atanassov, George Iliev