CIID Winter School 2020
Bringing Nordic design practice to Tokyo. Tadahiko Sakamaki handled product management for Japan’s first CIID Winter School during his time at Dentsu.
CIID Winter School 2020 brought the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design’s hands-on approach to Tokyo through a collaboration with Dentsu Business Design Square. At Dentsu’s headquarters in Shiodome, eight five-day courses ran across 10–14 and 17–21 February 2020.
The programme covered people-centred research, service design, interaction design, prototyping, inclusion, interactive spaces, organisational change and future casting. SDG themes connected the work to wider social challenges. In the service design course, fieldwork, idea development and prototypes turned observations into propositions that could be tested.
In the inclusion class, teams interviewed people about their working environments, developed prototypes and refined them through feedback. A final exhibition shared outcomes and processes across classes. Moving between an idea and another person’s response made design a tangible, collaborative practice.
The initiative connected design education with a question Sakamaki explored in his Dentsu-ho article: how can design become part of everyday business and management? CIID’s attention to people, technology and society offered a setting for examining whose needs a new service addresses and what change it might create.