A year or so ago I heard about plans to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and I’m really happy to see that they are now ready to launch their pilot year for 2008. Many of the people involved are ex-Ivrea and I notice that Live|Work’s Lavrans Løvlie and Frog Design’s Fabio Sergio are amongst the invited faculty, so there should be some great talent around the students.
The real trick is to build a structure that allows for the very best teaching and learning experiences. But as many of them have a background in service design they should be able to apply those skills to their own institution (but it’s always hard to be your own client).
Apart from the obvious interaction design connection, I’m interested in the way they might have set up the courses and their process there. Given many of my writings on education I have often wondered “what would I do if I were to start an institution from scratch?”.
It’s not a trivial task and most probably pretty scary to be doing. It was nice to stumble across this comment at the bottom of the CIID page:
This is an experiment – we’re diving in head-first and hope you will too. There’s a chance it might not happen, but we’re willing to take the risk and we’re looking for those daring enough to join us.
Something you would never see on any dull established university’s pages, yet the truth is all of them are hanging onto dear life in a whirlpool of change. The founders of CIID are at least happy about it and willing to be transparent.
I wish them the very best of luck.
p.s. They’re only looking for 15-20 students (the luxury!) in this pilot stage, so if you are interested head to the admissions page. Applications close at the end of August this year.