NEW 2023 SIT-KMU Summer Workshop
Last May(2023. 5. 26 - 29), Students from Shibaura Institute of Technology visited our department to co-host and participate in the 2023 KMU-SIT Summer Workshop. Especially, on the first day of the event students from the both institutions teamed up to introduce their culture to each other.
35 participants from KMU (2 advisors) and 31 participants from SIT (1 advisor) formed 15 teams and worked together during the workshop.
In the morning, as part of the 'User Experience Design' class, a second-year major class in the Industrial Design Department at Kookmin University, Shibaura students and Kookmin students teamed up to role-play a scenario in which AI systems were actively used in the home. The event was held in Room 315 on the 3rd floor of Kookmin University's Architecture Building.
The teams were randomly assigned and had a few minutes to introduce themselves and get to know each other before the role-playing began. Each team chose one of the various housing types and then freely wrote scenarios and distributed roles. Students improvised their ideas accordingly to develop various design insights by discovering the expectations, discomforts, and points of attention or consideration that arise when AI enters the home.
“I thought it would be similar because Japan also has a tea-drinking culture, but it seems that Japan is more formal and formalized than Korea. It was very interesting to learn about different cultures that seem to be the same.”
- Kookmin University student who experienced the tea ceremony.
After visiting the Myeongwon Folk Museum, students selected an exhibition that was held in the city and introduced the Japanese students to Korean culture. The Korean students chose to visit the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Craft Museum, and Hanji Culture, and Industry Center, and many of the Japanese students admired the unique beauty of Korean artworks and culture.
In addition to the exhibition space, the students also visited places where they could feel and experience Korean culture, such as craft streets, Insadong Street, and Bukchon Hanok Village, where they were able to exchange with Japanese students about each other's culture, perspectives on artworks, values, and attitudes toward viewing and experiencing exhibitions.
The Korean students were able to touch the Hanji and share their thoughts while viewing the artworks, while the Japanese students, on the other hand, mainly watched the artworks with their eyes and investigated the artworks personally rather than touching them. It was very interesting to see the differences, even in such small details.
Finally, the workshop concluded with a dinner for all the students together. It was a short day, but it felt like it was just enough time to get to know each other, and many of them looked forward to meeting again in the winter at SIT-KMU Design Workshop.
The KMU-SIT Summer Workshop provided an opportunity for creative idea-sharing between students from Korea and Japan and an experience of exchange and collaboration across cultural boundaries. By experiencing the beauty of Korean traditional culture and design, we were able to get closer to learning and understanding each other's cultures and develop the ability to design a better future with the power of design and culture.