This is a book of edited articles and design projects from five years of collaborative international design projects in developed and developing economies, including China, Thailand, Ghana and Japan. Part One contains articles on initiatives including e-commerce models for developing economies, massclusivity and craft design. Part Two is dedicated to design solutions for China’s rural-urban migration issues, which affect 55 million people a year. The project enhances knowledge about the application of design thinking to national-level issues connecting policy to implementation, extending design activity into large-scale social and economic areas.
The book follows an exhibition of design outcomes in London and Beijing (2010). Hall developed his chapter (‘Go Global: Ghana’) from a conference paper given at the ‘International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference’, South Korea (2009) and further expanded as a book chapter (with Barker) entitled ‘e-Artisans: Contemporary design for the global market’ in Global Design History (2011). ‘eArtisans’ researched a proposed e-commerce model linking designer-craftsmen with a global Internet sale and distribution model for African countries. The originality lay in proposing and testing knowledge, through design collaborations, in a combination of e-commerce enterprise models; it was significant in deploying the proposed model in an experimental educational initiative. The research was based on previous experience of design, craft and enterprise projects in Thailand and China, and aligned with a creative economies report by UNESCO (2008). The context was a collaboration at the KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana, where action-based research methods resulted in a case study illustrating cultural transfer. Support and partnership were also provided by Aid To Artisans, the British Council and Africa 53. A vital aspect was the discovery of how an e-commerce model changed design concepts and creative proposals. The GoGlobal project has continued with an edited publication, Designing Social City Experiences (Jin Nam and Hall 2013).