Design and Social Innovation: Kefalonia Greece

During the summer of 2019, I joined a group of NCSU design students at the Ionion Center for Art and Culture in Metaxata, Kefalonia, Greece. Our objectives were to learn and apply co-design and social innovation by practicing effective research methods, strategizing, and presenting in a real-life design context. During the first half of the program, we focused on familiarizing ourselves with Kefalonia’s culture, people, and history by dividing into groups that performed interviews, research, and field studies. Being part of the research team, we worked with articles, books, and documents archived from the Focas Kosmetatoes foundation. Through our research we gather data, while also creating a timeline of kefalonias historic events that would later aid groups through their ideating process. From our research, we learned that due to a series of events, such as the 1953 earthquakes, Kefalonia faced a huge diaspora and some of its history and cultural practices have dispersed with it. In order to preserve Kefalonia’s culture, history, and social practices, for the second part of the course, my team, a group consisting of two students from graphic design, one from art and design, and one from architecture, came up with an educational activity that could be easily included into schools around the island.

Proposal