Bob van Dijk & Hiroki Yamamoto in LAU’s Design Exchange ’09 Conference

Here are some excerpts from a recent post from the Graphic Design Department of the Lebanese American University in Beirut. It's a good example of cross cultural collaboration in Design Education in the Middle East.

“In a dynamic world with dynamic organizations, we need dynamic identities,” van Dijk said, explaining that the job was more about developing creative strategy than it was about simply designing attractive logos.
“We can all make nice things,” he added, “but the strategy behind it is more fascinating — it’s about trying to find the essence of a problem that a client has, and trying to solve that in a creative way.”
One project was to create a ghetto blaster for the deaf, a contradictory concept. Patricia Farah, a third-year graphic design student from LAU Byblos, thought of the ghetto blaster in terms of invasion of space rather than sound. She created a concept of balloons that rhythmically inflate and deflate, becoming so big that they would intrude into the space of passers-by, including the deaf... Farah says van Dijk “had the key and opened the creative door.” She adds: “In his class the sky is the limit.”
Students “really have to get out of their box,” explains van Dijk. “That’s why, I tell them ‘never trust your teacher.’ ” This does not mean “they should not have respect for their teacher … [but] if they have a different opinion about things, [they should] start to communicate and see how far the two can learn from each other,” van Dijk adds.
http://www.lau.edu.lb/news-events/news/archive/weeklong_design_conference_kic/