Empathy, color and territory. Aesthetic perception as a tool to enable collaborative design projects internationally.

MFA Heather Jones, Genesee College, MDP José Luis González Cabrero.

In a global environment design education has been mainly focusing on forming the hard skills within the profession, in designers these range around sketching, drawing, software knowledge, model making, etc. Frequently Universities, either locally or globally, turn into some sort of training camps that try to empower their students with a very standard set of skills and capabilities that every designer should have in order to develop on the job market and successfully insert themselves in the creative field, yet in that same global environment the soft skills such as communication, resilience, leadership, and empathy are relied more on the previous formation of the students and are rarely addressed in design programs.

Collaboration has been taken new forms in the academic context thanks to globalization, technology and online connectiveness, but also due to this acknowledgment of universities and design institutions that some soft skills are better developed in a multicultural, multi vision environment. This new take on global collaboration has resulted in a wide variety of programs between academic institutions oriented to develop both knowledge and collaboration.
This is an experience between the State University of New York and the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, both belonging to the COIL program (Collaborative On Line International Learning) who enables global collaboration in their bachelor students belonging to both schools. The program was established in 2016 and was offered to all the programs within both institutions.

The call was answered by the Fine Arts program in the Art department within the Genesee Community College of the SUNY located near Buffalo, New York, and the Industrial Design program in the Facultad del Hábitat belonging to the UASLP in San Luis Potosí, México, The goal of the collaboration between the programs was and still is to enhance both hard and soft skills of the design and art by setting up a platform of communication and empathy.

This paper aims to share the results of such program. It took place in the August-December semester of 2017 in a controlled exercise between design and art students from México and USA, an empathy enhancer experiment took place between both groups, where a design challenge was created through a thoughtful perception experiment and color psychology study. The main outcome was that students could discover the cultural richness of their counterparts working in cross-cultural teams. While working in these teams, the students creatively shaped and adjusted the previously created platform in order to know and establish a bond with their colleagues, new forms of communication and messaging came up and were improved thanks to the savviness of online resources and technologies that new generations have in hand.
All this bonding and networking was framed while practicing design thinking methodologies in a collaborative group setting to develop their aesthetic vision. And by the end of the cross-cultural collaboration, students exercised persuasive communication skills to pitch their final take of the collaboration and share it to the class for critique analysis characterized by openness and perspective between the class.

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