The publication is the outcome of a workshop conducted with 15 graphic design students and teachers from the Modern International Art and Design Academy (MIADA) in Chongqing while we were teaching at the MIADA for a semester. The city is a metropolitan area of more than 31 million people in the center of China. The research was focusing on personal visual stories and experiences relating to the city. The collection of work reflects a contemporary critical and social orientated perspective on the modern Chinese urban lifestyle. The rural depopulation around the city was an important and recurring topic.

Thirty-four students from the Photo/Video FVPCI department at the National University of Arts in Bucharest developed different themes referring to their home city of Bucharest. Abandond places were visited and documented, traffic problems visualized and poetic interpretations of the city were designed.

For the One Design Week Plovdiv 2015 we were asked to conduct a workshop with a group of local professionals in the city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. During the festival we also created a personal social design project with the title ‘Wisdoms of the neighbourhood’. Giving the local people and small shop owners a voice of the festival by using their statements on posters and spreading them to a wider audience. In 2019 Plovdiv wants to become the European Capital of Culture.

During the Design Week Mexico 2015, young creative professionals and students of Mexico’s biggest design school, CENTRO, explored different facets of this latin metropol. The participants documented and examined public squares, the local subway vendors, slogans and sounds of the informal street sellers, analyzing the city’s waste collection system and finding tools to stimulate exchange between inhabitants. The Design Week Mexico hosts in total 105 events with around 1000 different participants and organizations, visited by around 26.000 people.

In cooperation with the Dakar based Designer Sandy Haessner we guided seventeen photography and design professionals in their visual research about Dakar for eight days. The city is the economical and political focal point of the country. It functions as a trading hub to the rest of the world. The city attracts a lot of fortune seekers from the rural areas. Extreme poor and rich people living close to each other in a dense urban and fast growing city. The project was kindly financially supported by the Goethe Institute and took place in their headquarters in the city center.

During an entire week students from the graphic design department of the Pedagocial University ‘I. CREANGǍ’ focused on Chișină. Students treated topics such as: Local goods, city street lightning, illegal housing extensions, garbage, public transport and examined the problematic fact that a lot of parents leave their children behind with their grandparents to work abroad. Chișină is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Moldova with an estimated population of 674,500.