Designers in the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica are gaining valuable exposure to international processes and practices in the field of product design as the International Trade Centre (ITC) holds workshops aimed at honing the skills of Caribbean designers. The workshops, which are part of a wider ITC project on promoting the CARIFORUM Creative Industries, feature instruction from Italian designers Giulio Romano and Valerio Vinaccia of Studio Vinaccia in Milan.
ITC is working toward strengthening the capacity within the Creative Industries sector in the Caribbean to enable it to adequately respond to international market demands. To this end, the award-winning designers from Studio Vinaccia shared their expertise in the area of new product design techniques.
“Hearing from successful design professionals already operating in key international markets is an important way for enterprises to learn about the latest techniques and strategies,” said ITC project coordinator and senior trade promotion officer Jeanette Sutherland, ‘Workshops like these also raise awareness about the significance of the creative industries to Caribbean economies.’
The workshops are being staged in collaboration with Caribbean Export, which is the region’s lone export and trade promotion agency in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group. The initiative builds on work that Caribbean Export undertook during 2007-09, partially financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to develop design capacity within the sector. The workshops will help to further much of Caribbean Export’s own work with entrepreneurs in the Creative Industries sector to prepare them for export.
As part of the continued development of the producers participating in the workshops a number of the successful designs will be chosen and their creators sponsored to showcase their pieces in the Caribbean Export led exhibition, Design Caribbean to be staged in the Dominican Republic in September of this year.
Workshops were held in the Dominican Republic on May 12th – 16th, in Barbados on May 17th – 24th, in Jamaica on June 5th – 11th and Trinidad on June 13th -17th. The final workshop takes place in Haiti on June 27th – July 1st.
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